Ruby Barnes's Blog, page 2

It would take a special kind of secluded living not to know that Donald Trump has been in the role of President of the United States of America since January 2017. He’s the media’s villain and the media’s darling, depending upon the media. Notoriety is generally more newsworthy than being a hero and so most of the Trump stories we hear in Europe are disparaging. But where does the truth lie?
News media tend to have a bias. If your personal tendency is right-wing then you are likely to follow certain news sources that reinforce your world view. If you’re more left-wing then another list of media outlets will be more to your taste. Sometimes people sample the news via channels they don’t respect or believe, just to get a bit of spice thrown into the mix. Social media can broaden people’s news church but it can also narrow it. Facebook, in particular, will serve up newsfeeds from individuals’ newsfeeds and pages that are matched by algorithms to your own friends list, pages you have visited etc. The risk is that people end up preaching to the choir, or end up in the choir being preached to, and only one perspective gets presented. These days a lot of folk get their news from social media and believe what they see. The problem is this may sometimes be – yes, a phrase that is synonymous with the Trump presidency – fake news.
Social media is full of fake news these days. Was that always the case? It seems I can’t remember when it wasn’t. As an author, I don’t take a strong political or idealistic stance (perhaps sometimes I should). I have a wide circle of facebook friends and this gives me a broad perspective when it comes to viewpoints, both politically and geographically. I read stuff that makes me groan, other things that make me laugh, and content that makes me think further, wondering if it’s fake. Rarely do I unfriend, unfollow or block someone on social media. Also I don’t engage in political or idealistic online conversation. (I lurk and throw in the occasional one-liner with hopefully comic effect. But I take it all in, I see human nature in the raw and absorb what I see to help fuel my writer’s imagination.) When I see something outrageous, I fact check. Almost invariably, regardless of the viewpoint, it’s either fake news, taken out of context or only partially true. 
In the run up to Trump’s election, and since his inauguration, fake political news has been crashing through social media like a hailstorm. It’s bewildering. As a larger-than-life character, Donald Trump is a soft target for cheap ridicule. Mocking him for his creative hairstyle or those strangely small hands is just being mean. His oratory style and tendency towards hyperbole are not what a lot of people typically expect from a POTUS, but he doesn’t claim or want to be a typical POTUS. He wants to shake things up. According to The Guardian UK newspaper, he had made 7,645 false or misleading claims since taking office, sometimes more than 100 in one day. How could this possibly be the case? Surely a Head of State has to be taken at his/her word and any untruths would be a cause for grave concern? 
The peculiarity of the Trump presidency is perplexing to us Europeans, over in these staid old countries where one bold-faced lie can bring down a leader or even a government. Just 12 hours ago, Trump tweeted a quote from One America News - “There’s not one shred of evidence that President Trump has done anything wrong.”How did the world become a place where the president of a huge and powerful nation feels he needs to share those words? 24 hours ago Trump tweetedDespite the most hostile and corrupt media in the history of American politics, the Trump Administration has accomplished more in its first two years than any other Administration. A quick Google search on this topic produced an interesting article from the UK’s BBC, which suggests that there were some areas where the Trump administration has exceeded the results of previous ones. However, rate of turnover amongst senior level advisors and length of government shutdown due to funding are probably not the medals he’s looking for. But hey, we know he doesn’t really believe what he himself is saying, except in the moment. He’s just trumpet blowing, like the childhood rhyme of dominance – I’m the king of the castle, and you’re the dirty rascal.
So what is the truth? What’s going on? Normally I would raise my hands (in Trump fashion) and say look, America is a very different society to ours. All countries have their problems, often depending on complex historical factors. In little old Ireland, where I live as an ex-pat Brit, we have very few deaths due to firearms, there isn’t an opioid crisis and racism is more subtle than skin tone. How can we begin to understand life across the pond? Leave the USA alone. If they want Trump (and the majority of voters, by whatever rules in play, must have chosen his team) then let us just enjoy the spectacle and see what results. But then, while trying to use up a spare half hour waiting for a train in Dublin’s Heuston Station, I stumbled over a copy of Fire and Fury. I rarely read non-fiction but something made me pick it up. Perhaps reading this would make things clearer?
The surprising thing about Fire and Fury was that there was nothing surprising in it, when it came to a catalogue of White House events. From stories of the Trump campaign trail, the rousing calls of the candidate at mega-rallies, the tumultuous early days of the presidency, and the myriad well-heeled individuals who made cameo White House appearances before being sacked or resigning – everything was familiar. When Wolff quoted such a person or an anonymous source as having said or done something, I knew it already. This wasn’t because I was late to the party – I had bought the paperback a year after the hardback was first released. It was because the world, through global media, had lived through all this. 
Wolff tells a story of a latter-day Game of Thrones, with the houses of Trump, Bannon and Priebus battling for ascendancy. GoT with a twist, because none of the main cast has any real gladiatorial experience in the Washington colosseum. White Walkers, Wildlings, the Night’s Watch, noble dynasties, Viking types, warrior queens, mean-looking lads on horses, all waving their weapons and circling each other, with one eye on the media scavengers who sniff for carrion. The chaos proves too much for some would-be warriors who leave the field after their first blood wounds. New heroes then arise, only to have their skulls ceremoniously crushed by dominant champions. The Princess summons her dragon to breathe fire upon the weakened in-house foes, but we know the dragon will eventually take his own flight. Once I finished the book, I had to google the characters’ real-life names and find out what happened in the sequel. Sure enough, the outsider victors of the Wolff story have all since succumbed to their fate, Trump blood and marriage being the only certain protection against treachery and spells.
Critics have said that Wolff played with the facts on occasion. One reviewer criticised him for using the device of unreliable narrator (although I’m not sure that review really properly explained the method) but surely that’s the whole point of the story. Everyone in the organisation has a different world view, and many live in their own reality. Some (albeit not many) see themselves as following their great leader. Others endeavour to mollify his excesses. Another plays the role of guru. The big man himself just wants to be loved and plays fast and loose with any material at hand to achieve that end. 
This book has, however, had an unexpected effect upon me. I am no longer surprised or appalled by anything that Donald Trump says or does. If I look at his historical tweets I just say yeah, that’s him, or no, I think someone else wrote that one. Fire and Fury has numbed me to the unfiltered thoughts of the current POTUS. I find myself able to step back and wonder if what he does and says will really have any impact upon my little world. Bearing in mind that the House of Representatives shifted control to the Democrats after the recent mid-terms (which, of course, very often happens during a US presidency), Donald Trump is going to have increasing difficulty implementing his campaign promises. Until next time.

A few simple steps will serve you well over the festive season. You'll look younger, feel stronger and hitt the new year with a running start.

Step 1 - Head to a reasonable clothes outlet (e.g. Next or River Island) and buy a pair of those smart jeans with the stretch fabric. Buy a new top too, something with high cotton content and just a little loose.

Step 2 - Shave that beard. What? You didn't grow the pre-Christmas beard? Didn't you get the memo? Shave the beard down to stubble and keep it that length for the duration. Don't mind about female family member complaints after Christmas kisses - they secretly like the abrasion. Step 2 is optional for the ladies (at a certain angle and in a certain light that upper lip shadow can be very attractive).

Step 3 - Adopt a Christmas and New Year exercise routine. This should be muscle intensive e.g. 3 sets of pushups and 3 sets of squats. Do this every other day with increasing intensity. E.g. 3 sets of 10 squats at the start, working up to 3 sets of 40 by the end with extra weight (a small child on your shoulders or your life partner on your back, for example).

Step 4 - Eat everything that comes near you. How else are you going to gain weight?

Step 5 - Drink everything that comes near you. You're going to need hydration with all that exercise.

Now watch yourself develop. The weight gain should be at least half a stone (7lb). You know this is muscle because your trousers aren't getting tighter (stretch) but your shirt (wash frequently) is getting more snug around the shoulders.

Step 6 - Decrease your intake of turkey and ham as the meat's consumability moves from "probably still okay" to "wouldn't give that to the dog". (Don't throw the remaining ham in the compost bin like last year, when it got stuck to the bottom and didn't come out til Easter. Don't even want to talk about what that was like.)

Step 7 - Gradually change your liquid intake to less carbs. The cans of beer that you used to hydrate yourself in between Christmas day meals should be changed to wine. Start with red, migrate to rosé and white, then move on to the gin & tonic. Over the course of two weeks, not all in one day. Gin & tonic is practically a health drink. Put fruit and vegetables in it. Make sure your Christmas presents included a breathalyser. Never, Ever drink and drive.

You should reach your destination in good shape (mentally) with a solid muscle gain (mentally) and having had a good time. Reality will hit in due course but we'll deal with that when we come to it.
You're welcome.

This blog post is written in the spirit of this is how it turned out so I'll pretend that was my intention from the start.

Evergreen content is a boon for social media. If you write a blog post that is interesting or useful for your target audience in perpetuity (or at least for a good while) then it is sensible and reasonable to reuse that content. Like a plant that doesn't shed its leaves during winter (e.g. laurel, holly, most conifers), such content can be called evergreen. I have several writing and social media posts on this blog that have generated a lot of traffic over the last few years and, in the main, they're of the evergreen variety. So it makes sense to nudge a potential audience towards those posts with e.g. Twitter. One tweet a day helps point people in the right direction and, if the tweets are numerous enough and carefully worded, why not recycle them?
I have a list of around sixty tweets which I run sequentially out of my @Ruby_Barnes Twitter account. Or at least I did, until recently. I used an app called Feed140 which allowed me to upload a playlist of tweets and schedule them for release. I loved Feed140 for its simplicity but, alas, it is no more. Kudos to Doug Hudiberg for his work with Feed140. I'm sorry it didn't work out and I wish you all the best for the future. Now I'm going to have to delve into another app for scheduling my evergreen content tweets. Any suggestions?

So, it's 1st June 2018 and the sky hasn't fallen down. On 25th May 2018 the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into force. If you haven't heard about it then lucky you. But you're probably in the same boat as I am. A subscriber to just about everything, my mailbox has been chock full of messages from all kinds of organisations requiring me to take action because of GDPR. Some require me to update my details on their list and give consent to continue receiving communications from them. Others just advise me that they have updated their privacy policy and given me a link to it or even included the long, long privacy policy in their message. Squirrel that I am, I file away all these missives under "GDPR". But not just for posterity. The content of these messages, combined with a large number of articles and podcasts on the subject, has been my reference library for how the real world has handled GDPR and allowed me to form my own opinion and strategy on the subject.

A quick word on all those GDPR mails that I received from publishers, authors, vendors, associations etc. I didn't get enough of them. I should have received something like 400 mails. Because that's how many unique logins and passwords I have saved in my browser privacy & security section. So 350+ individuals / organisations have failed to comply with GDPR, because I'm a European Union citizen and they hold my data. But I won't hold it against them. Let them sweat. I'm cool about it.

Now, the disclaimer. I'm not a GDPR expert and I'm not a lawyer, so what you decide to do for yourself is entirely up to you, no liability accepted by Ruby. But I have nearly half an idea what I'm talking about. As Compliance Manager (up until recently) for a national data operation, I've had the great pleasure of meeting with data protection officials and trudging through a data protection policy for the organisation. It's dry stuff and we drank a lot of tea. I knew GDPR was coming and I suppose it was and wasn't a surprise how things turned out. Some people panicked. Some people saw a chance to make money. But there are a lot of very useful resources online which will help those who need help. A real lot of resources. Free resources, you don't need to spend hundreds of notes on a "GDPR pack". So, do you need help? Should you have done something? Have you got your head in the sand?


If you are an independent author or a small publisher (there are of course other interested parties but those two categories are the ones I'm talking about here), then you probably handle customer data. I'm talking specifically about mail lists. If any of those customers reside in the European Union then you are affected by GDPR. If you / your publishing outfit is located in the European Union then you are affected by GDPR. If you have a non-EU location and you have no EU customers then you can stop reading and go pick up a free copy of Zombies v. Ninjas: Origin . (Read that and you will understand how we in the EU are feeling about GDPR.)

At the risk of repetition, let's make this simple:
if you're an independent author or a small publisher with a mail list which includes EU citizens, then you need to observe the GDPR; if you're an independent author or a small publisher based in the EU, then you need to observe the GDPR.Continuing with the simple theme, you need to be able to demonstrate where you obtained the contact data from and what consent that individual gave for use of their data. You need to look at your mail list(s) and decide if you can demonstrate the provenance of the contacts and their data in that list. Should the GDPR police descend upon your darkened room (unlikely event but who knows. The Handmaid's Tale and all that...), will you be able to explain through the splutter of tear gas to the intruders just why you think you have the right to retain and use the data of individual humans?
If your contact has bought your product and joined your list then happy days. They have demonstrated their interest in your product by flashing their wallet and signed up to receive your newsletter etc. You should inform them of your privacy policy (you do have a privacy policy, right?) and the option to unsubscribe in all future communications.If your contact hasn't (or you can be sure if they have) bought your product, but has joined your list ("enter your email here to join our list and receive..." etc) then also happy days. They have given consent to be mailed your newsletter etc. Again, you should inform them of your privacy policy (you do have a privacy policy, right?) and the option to unsubscribe in all future communications.If you don't really know where you sourced the contact information, if you can't demonstrate that your sign-up form made it clear that they were giving consent to future communication, then you need to ask them to reconfirm their consent to future communication.If you know that the contact information was manually uploaded by yourself or your organisation, and there is no real record of their consent to future communication, then you need to ask them toreconfirm their consent to future communication. In my own case, I run four mail lists and can clearly demonstrate consent for three of them. The fourth was obtained as part of a joint initiative with other authors wherein readers expressed their interest and agreed to be added to the mail list of the author whose book they liked. But I can't say that the small print was adequate for GDPR. The open and click rate for that list is very low. So I've had to reconfirm consent with the readers on that list and yes, I've lost a fair chunk of it. But a good number have confirmed.

Now finally, to mention again your privacy policy. You do have a privacy policy, don't you? And it's clearly displayed on your blog / website? If GDPR affects you then you need a privacy policy. It doesn't have to be twenty pages long but it does need to be relevant. You can't just copy paste someone else's privacy policy, but you can use them to inform your own. Take a look at author and publisher websites and track down their privacy policies. Study the privacy policies in GDPR emails sent to you by organisations similar to yours. Then formulate your own and get it out there as soon as.

The GDPR police are probably not going to storm your building. They have bigger fish to fry. But better safe than sorry.

Ruby reviews American Values by Jim Williams

Alternative histories are a tempting canvas for historical fiction writers. The “What if?” question might be, for example, a different outcome to a major battle or war, the survival of a key figure who died relatively young or the early demise of a stabilising character. Sometimes the novel places another perspective on a famous historical event that is shrouded in some mystery, offering an explanation where conspiracy theories hold sway. 
American Values by Jim Williams uses both of these devices and places the reader in a 1963 which has already seen three decades of Presidential rule by a charismatic individual who has turned democracy into a dictatorship, founded upon his nationalistic American Values policy. The figurehead, “Big A”, is a despicably familiar character who rose to power during a time of American crisis, survived attempts to depose him and built a formidable police state around his personality cult. But no one lives forever and the natural end of his reign is approaching. 
“Big A” is not, however, the main figure in American Values so much as a key component explaining the context of how America could have become an authoritarian country ravaged by decades of large-scale wars fought on foreign soils. The Old Man is expected to depart soon and the life or death race for succession is on. Harry Bennet, a foreign correspondent, is the main character in this historical thriller and we see through his eyes how thirty years of “Big A” has resulted in a society where no one trusts anyone, colleagues, friends and family are encouraged to denounce each other, and multiple security forces compete for primacy. (The characters fronting these forces will be familiar to the reader.)
Harry starts out with good intentions but becomes tangled in the General State Police web when he falls in love with Maria, whose racial ancestry might not stand up to American Values’ scrutiny. Harry’s first favour for the regime results in a bullet in the brain for a government operative and Harry is left holding the smoking gun. He and Maria go on the run and begin to discover too much about American Values.
Some might say that a country like the United States could never become an authoritarian society; that institutionalized racial persecution would not be tolerated by the free-thinking populace; that the USA would never send all of its young men abroad to defend and secure the nation’s interests and conquer the enemy. But the country has arguably never had a dominant charismatic leader in a time of crisis. Lenin and Stalin’s impact upon the USSR was profound and their legacy endured long after the characters departed. As for the key actor in 1930s Germany…what if? 
Jim Williams takes dark aspects of human nature from other parts of history and transplants them into the fertile soil of American Values. The result is a gripping and harrowing tale from which no one emerges covered in glory, but at least some survive.
American Values by Jim Williams is available on Amazon in paperback and ebook.

We Brethren have an ancient accord with the bipeds. It's a symbiotic relationship and benefits both species. I like to compare it with the ants and aphids dynamic. The ants protect and the aphids feed them.

Historically, the Brethren had no need of the bipeds. We were perfectly capable of hunting our own food and we're natural predators, so we had no need of protection. But at some point, long ago forgotten, a pale, hairless species with only two legs bartered their food for the sharp teeth, tough claws, snapping jaws and swift legs of the Brethren, and we took the bipeds under our wing. That's a metaphorical wing, obviously.

In modern times, things have become very domesticated. The bipeds have developed their shelters and provide themselves with an endless variety of toys to while away their long hours of sedentary life. They've lost the hunting and foraging skills that first attracted the Brethren to the accord and they no longer take their food from the land. Instead, they mimic foraging in a controlled environment where the food and drink items are displayed (barely concealed) in a single structure. The feeble enthusiasm with which the younger bipeds greet the elders, when they return from fake-foraging, is a pale echo of the past.

However, bipeds still need our protection, and so the Brethren maintains the bargain. We keep them safe from predators (some of whom are bipeds) and provide them with continuous reassurance that the perimeter is secure. If a member of another biped pack attempts an incursion on our joint territory, then we repel them until our own bipeds show signs that they feel safe with the intruders. Bipeds are naturally nervous. Anything from a knock on the door, a bell ringing, the rattle of a fence panel or any unfamiliar noise will cause them to raise their heads from their toys and throw a worried glance at us. It's expected that we will launch a show of aggression against the threat and, to do so, we maintain constant vigilance. All this for two meals a day and a bowl of water. I sometimes wonder if the accord is stacked against the Brethren, but this is the accord and we keep it.

My particular pack of bipeds are typical of those in the area. Pale-skinned and virtually hairless, constantly chattering nonsense, teeth and claws that are useless for defending themselves. Slow, awkward and unbalanced, they are easy meat for any carnivore and so they travel around mostly within protective metal structures that can move faster than any biped.

I've been with this pack now for five sun circles. The behaviour of bipeds, from what I understand from my forefathers, has degenerated in recent generations. My biped pack leader, well I assume he's the alpha-male although the dynamic in the pack seems somewhat fluid at times, is particularly slow and stiff. He needs exercise at least once a day but is reluctant to venture out if the weather is bad. I can understand this to some extent - if my skin was bare to the elements, except for a grey fuzz around the snout, then would I be bothered with the ritual of cladding myself in layers of material just for twenty minutes of shuffling around the external environment? Probably not.

The lead biped - the other pack members call him Dad or sometimes Bark (they can't pronounce the B and it comes out sounding like Mmmark) - is easily led. Now and then he will stop during the walk to look at his toy or chatter to the ground, sky or another biped if they appear non-threatening. If the area is secure then I will let him disconnect and wander freely. I maintain a perimeter patrol while he ambles along and it's never difficult to find him as he always follows the same route. If he's in distress then he emits a weird, high-pitched sound which means he needs my protection. I'll come running to his aid, although if there's no visible threat then I might take my time about it.

The strange behaviour that has led me to assign a nick-name to my biped pack leader is his fascination with excrement. Bipeds are notoriously secretive with their own bodily waste and seem to store it under the dwelling, which is bad enough. Any sane living thing knows that the elements are the way to treat natural waste, but I have never seen an adult biped defecate in public. Dad or Bark has extended this strange obsession with my own doings and goes through a bizarre ritual whenever I perform my toilet during his walk. He huffs and puffs, rummages within the layers of material covering his pale and hairless body, and produces his right hand - always his right - covered in some thin and crinkly unnatural sheeting. Then he strides purposefully - the only time he moves in this way during the entire walk - to my delivery site and painfully bends his knees to examine my faeces. There are usually some mutterings which sometimes put a smile on his face, and then he scoops up my waste and twirls it around in the crinkly sheeting. About half way through the walk, he places the package in a green receptacle. From the smell in passing this receptacle, I can tell this is a communal collection. I once saw a man in a small vehicle empty the green receptacle, presumably to take the contents off to a larger collection point. I imagine that is a place of worship.

The Dad or Bark character now goes by the name of The Collector when I think of him or discuss him with other Brethren. On days that the weather is too bad for The Collector to venture out for his exercise, I naturally take care of my business on the patch of grass at the rear of the pack dwelling. This poses no problem that I know of, as the pack never uses that grass and nature's elements will dispose of things within a few spins of the planet. But no, The Collector doesn't want to miss an opportunity and every few days he will spend some quality time shuffling around the dwelling grass and collecting my deposits in a bucket. The Collector is very methodical in this, appearing to cover the area in quadrants, although he often misses something. I try to be creative in my locations, so as to make the experience more fulfilling for The Collector. When he thinks he has collected all, he ambles down to the end of the dwelling grass, where he has created a kind of shrine, and there he piles his collection. He mutters a few ritual sounds, grabs a handful of leaves or grass, sprinkles them on top and nods his head before returning to the safety of the dwelling. Then he resumes to play with his toys.

This is the modern biped world of fake-foraging and turd worship. I think it's just a passing phase. I hope so.

Alfie of the Brethren

HBS Author's Spotlight features yours truly today with details of what I've been writing and what I have planned for the future. Please click the link and go take a look! http://hbsauthorspotlight.blogspot.ie/2016/05/ra-barnes-author-interview-at-hbs.html

This non-fiction title is a collection of blog posts by Jamie Clubb, the founder of Club Chimera Martial Arts. I’ve never read the author’s blog but the chapters of this book are plenty long enough (not always the case with books formed from a collection of blog posts) and they group very nicely into the four sections of the book. Also worth a mention is the writing style which makes for easy reading while delivering enough detail to satisfy. The author manages to get his knowledge and experience across without preaching or condescension. Extensive use of reference material provides further credibility and the seven page list of those references provides a great starting point for those who might wish to delve further into martial arts reading.
The first section is titled Martial Mutterings and provides some very interesting background to the various combat sports that are known as the martial arts. If the reader is a martial artist (such as myself, I’m a karate practitioner) then these chapters help to place your sport in the martial universe. Jamie Clubb’s leaning is obviously towards self-defence and he begins to hint that many martial arts are not really practical in that sense, but he deals fairly with the validity of the different disciplines and clearly has a great breadth of experience.
Self-Protection is the second section and here the author begins to deal with his own special area of focus – how to be emotionally prepared and physically secure in the increasingly physically threatening modern environment. The four tenets of Club Chimera – Respect, Awareness, Courage and Discipline – are delved into with unassailable logic. The section concludes with some very interesting suggestions on pre-emptive strikes, proactive training and pressure testing. Having myself trained with four very different karate clubs over thirty years, I can appreciate the acid testing that is needed for effective self-defence. All too often martial artists can become deluded about the effectiveness of their carefully perfected, artistic techniques.
Reality Training for Children deals with the thorny issue of exposing children to the threats of twenty-first century life and finding ways for them to handle such situations. The first step is to train the teachers, as genuine self-defence for children is a rare commodity. Then the author deals with the why, what and how of his approach to reality training for children. He doesn’t give away his trade secrets but just enough to tantalise.
The fourth and final section is Training: Fit for Purpose – a very interesting set of perspectives on attitudes towards and types of training and fitness, including the pitfalls of being led astray by fitness training as an end in itself.
In conclusion, I found Mordred’s Victory and other Martial Mutterings by Jamie Clubb to be a very thought provoking read. Each chapter deserves careful reading and contemplation. Whether you pursue martial arts for fitness, sport, competition, art or self-defence, this book will assist in self-realisation and help any martial artist find their own path. The extensive reference section deserves another mention. Overall, highly recommended. 
Mordred’s Victory and other Martial Mutterings by Jamie Clubb is available on Amazon here.
Disclosure: I received a free copy of this book in exchange for a fair review. I have no prior connection with the author (although I am a martial arts fan and practitioner).

One of those truisms trotted out at management seminars, to ASSUME makes an ASS out of U and ME has people scrabbling for their pens and noting the phrase so they can lay claim to it in front of future audiences. But I'm guilty of ASSUMING. After a few years in this e-book business I have assumed that everyone knows what an e-book is, where they can get them and how to read them.

The truth is lots of people do know all about e-books (they're electronic files e.g. type mobi or azw for Kindle devices, type ePub for Apple and Nook and Kobo and Android and others, or even just plain old pdf) and are familiar with e-readers (Kindle, Nook, Kobo, almost any Apple device, almost any Android device).

But a large number of people really don't know about the world of e-books and how to read them. They just haven't delved into e-books. They don't know how to grab an e-book for a few bucks instead of shelling out several times as much for a hard copy. They don't have a Kindle ("What the hell is a Kindle anyway?") and don't realize that e-books don't require a dedicated e-reader. The answer to reading an e-book without a dedicated e-reader is to use an app.

If you want to buy and read e-books from the behemoth Amazon then you'll find they have FREE apps available for PC, Mac and other devices and Android (see links in column right). They also have a neat page where you can just enter your email or phone number and they'll send you a link to your app.



If you have an Android phone or tablet then you can also grab a free app for your preferred store from Google Play. The same applies for the Apple Store but, not being too clever at that sort of thing, I've fallen down on the link for that.

What I tend to do is install all apps on all my devices (I have a laptop, an iPhone and an old Kindle) and keep my e-book purchasing options open. I do tend to buy from Amazon though and then read via the Kindle App. The great thing about that is all three devices are connected through Kindle and I can pick up from the last page read at any time via any device.

Once you have your app(s) installed then you can go shopping at your e-bookstore of choice. If you happen to come across an e-book as a file on your laptop or PC (for example if you sign up to my list and grab a free copy of my first in the zombie series) then you can side-load the file onto your device by simply connecting that device via cable to the computer. (The only vagary I've come across with this is that Kobo devices like an extra suffix of "kepub" before the filetype suffix, so the filename needs to be edited e.g. from book.epub to book.kepub.epub. I have a Kobo Touch reader too, which is how I found that out.)

So, I hope I've gone some way to remedying the ASSUME phenomena regarding e-books. All of my titles are available in e-book format but, if you're a staunch paper addict then they're also available in paperback too.



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I've been writing under the name Ruby Barnes / R.A. Barnes for some time now. It's a pen name, in memory of my late Scottish grandfather Robert "Ruby" Aloysius Barnes. Here in Ireland we have famous men named Ruby (okay, so there's one, Ruby Walsh the champion jockey), so it's not totally weird for me to work under what looks like a female name. I did change to R.A. a little while back to try and be a little less "cozy", as my writing isn't "cozy" at all (and readers of my books will concur with that). However, I knew that one day I would have to cast off my cloak of Ruby and strut my street name. That day has come.

I will remove my disguise once I've got rid of this wasps' nest
A couple of years ago I met another writer, one more widely published and successful than Ruby but working even more in the shadows than I. A ghostly apparition, one might say. After a few opening salvos, we concluded that it might be fun to write a novel together. Fun in the way that full contact karate is fun as long as you have adequate protection for your private parts and beauty bits. There was a plot outline, some early work and a strong sense of what had to be done. The missing component was someone who could write Nasty. I had Nasty in a bottle in the spirit of John Baptist and other baddies. It seemed right up my street. Except I don't do plotting and all that. I'm what writers call a pantser.
Wot? No plot?
So I had to drop my pants and run with the lady's plot. It wasn't easy. There was shouting and screaming and hand-to-hand combat. That was the co-authors. But the result was sublime. A struggle to the death by two determined individuals with unique voices. That was the characters. Experienced beta readers were engaged to advise along the way. Each chapter was put through the mangle and came out freshly pressed. The female HALO character is in control but dangerous and with a wonky moral compass. The male SHARD character is evil, vindictive, sadistic, sexually-perverted and lusting for revenge. (Guess which one I wrote.)

John Goldsmith's review of Kill Them Twice says it all much better than I can:

"Everything you don’t expect and everything you want. This is one of the higher aims of any work of fiction, regardless of genre, and it is fiendishly difficult to attain.
Eveleigh and Turner’s super-charged thriller Kill Them Twice gets you there at page one, chapter one, paragraph one – one could almost say, sentence one and keeps you constantly encountering the unexpected and relishing the manifold treats all along the way to the bittersweet, counter-intuitive conclusion."
(See the rest of John's review here)

So, I am an author and my name is Mark Turner. There, I've said it. My pants are round my ankles. I need a beer.

Kill Them Twice is available from 4th September 2015 at the following outlets (at a special release price of 99c / 99p):

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We've provided some insights into the mindset of Halo and Shard in our blog post The A to Z of Kill Them Twice. 

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