Saw the RSC’s wonderful current production of Cymberline at Vue last night. A fantastic performance of an under-rated Shakespeare play!

Finally, after 5 years of writing, editing and researching what to do with it, I have self-published this novel.

All the learning about how to publish the book with the best chance of success was new to me. I’ve learnt a lot about producing physical copies, cover design, editing and marketing.

I found getting to grips with marketing the hardest thing to learn – I know I made a mistake this time around and the book probably won’t sell many copies at first, but I’m hoping to correct that when I publish ‘Dead Snow’ in 2017.

The marketing resources I found particularly useful include the following:

• “Reader Magnets” by Nick Stephenson
• “Email Marketing Demystified” by Matthew Paulson
• “Book Launch Marketing” by Theodore Roach
• “Self-Publishing on Createspace” by Dr Andy Williams
• “Beyond the Page” by Andrew Purdum”

The following Facebook groups:
• ‘Fiction Writers’, ‘Aspiring Authors’,
• ‘Self-Publishing and Book Marketing’,
• ‘Indie Science Fiction Writers’, ‘Pat’s First Kindle Book’

• and Dan Dynneson’s “The Best-Selling Fiction Podcast”
… the mistakes I made with launching ‘An End of Beginnings’ are all my own – the advice from these people was very good!

However, I am very proud of what I have achieved with this book. Sometimes you have to take a chance and have a go, even when you know it won’t be perfect. That’s a very hands-on way of quickly learning. A couple of years ago I was lucky to listen to a talk by Jim Lawless on self-motivation and entrepreneurialism that he calls ‘Taming Tigers’ (see jimlawless.com for more information). Jim really inspired me to get on with turning this story into a published novel and 3 pieces of his advice resonated strongly:

       • Act boldly today – time is limited,
       • Head in the direction of where you want to arrive, every day,
      • There is no safety in numbers.

My thanks to all those inspirational writers, influencers and advisors who helped me to think this book through to reality!

Whilst on holiday in Torbay, on 7th July I visited the “Visions of the Future” exhibition at Torquay Museum.

This was a 9-week display of original props and costumes from some of the most famous, modern science fictions films. There were displays from Star Wars, Alien, Predator, Prometheus, Riddick and more.

It was great to be able to see the costumes close up and have the time to really appreciate them. I was surprised at how flimsy the BSG Viper pilot’s costume was, especially when contrasted with the heavy build of Kane’s spacesuit from Alien.

It was also cool to see an original hypersleep capsule from Prometheus; the styling and decoration made it seem quite realistic. There was also an original storage cylinder which was interesting to see but hard to photograph in the display case.

I’m really pleased I took the time to walk around this one-off display in Torquay!

Back on 21st June my brother and I visited the “Sci-Fi by the Sea” convention in Herne Bay… we had a fun day out!

This annual event is organised by local people as an attraction to draw people into the town. There was a lot of interest and the tickets had sold out before the day – luckily I had prepaid, phew!

Many people were enjoying the cosplay and I was very impressed with some of the costumes. There was an excellent display of props and costumes for Dr Who. I find the Weeping Angels particularly creepy and couldn’t resist that piccy…

There were lots of people in Stars Wars cosplay of course! Here are my favourites (I think I annoyed Yoda by being more excited with the Stormtrooper’s costume!).  Fewer people were enjoying Star Trek cosplay but that was more than made up for with this excellent Enterprise Bridge set – how often do we get to sit in Picard’s seat?

My Second Place Award goes to Michael Keaton’s Batmobile.

My FIRST PLACE award goes to this Blake’s 7 Federation Stormtrooper – perhaps I should have shown my ID when asked!

And that was it for 2015 – maybe next year I’ll go in cosplay!

A good understanding of past events shapes our appreciation of the present and helps us to make plans for the future…

Unfortunately, it seems to me that many people have learnt little from the garbled hodgepodge of History they were taught at school and probably don’t pay attention to contemporary news events. Their understanding of ‘history’ is mostly limited to their own direct experiences and some awareness of a few family tales – not a very solid foundation for Society to act from.

I am sure that every generation feels that its successors lack an appreciation of the historical and cultural context of modern society. Part of the problem is that both groups are right: younger generations tend to look for opportunities in the future and naturally disregard the constraints on thinking that older people have acquired. Older people can tend to think that the younger generation’s ideas are reckless because they disregard those same constraints that they believe are sensible. It becomes harder to reconcile these two positions when the generations no longer share a common cultural perspective.

Some recent conversations with younger friends and colleagues are pointing to a divergence between our ideas of national Culture. I was talking about the current sabre rattling by Russia following their annexation of Crimea in March 2014. The unconventional warfare tactics used by Russia to seize another European state’s territory, combined with their subsequent threats about their military and nuclear weapons capabilities are already triggering defensive responses from NATO. Indeed, Russia has recently announced a (credible) large-scale improvement in the capabilities of its ICBM arsenal.

The normal ‘man in the street’, growing up in the era since the end of the First Cold War, cannot fully appreciate the completely uncompromising, totally ferocious nature of the Total Warfare that was narrowly avoided between East and West.

When considering other, smaller, hot wars and conflicts, the lack of first-hand accounts in their families and Hollywood’s steady output of war films gives them an unrealistic vision of how bad things could really get.

Yet the level of tension between West and East already feels very much higher than we have experienced over the past twenty years following the end of the Cold War. Russia is exerting pressure on national borders: there are frequent reports of their aircraft being intercepted and diverted away from national airspaces, and in October 2014 Sweden mounted a week-long search for a suspected Russian submarine violating its national waters.

Perhaps we should more properly say that the First Cold War ended in 1991 with the ending of the Soviet Union, since it seems clear that in many important ways, a Second Cold War has already started. We can only hope that these factors don’t eventually lead to a direct confrontation between East and West, Russia and NATO. Even if they don’t, the experiences of the latter 20th century showed that a Cold War can trigger intense Hot Wars (eg Korea, Vietnam).

My grandparents’ stories about living through World War II showed me that warfare is very unpleasant and not to be desired unless all else has failed. Even though I had those first-hand accounts to learn from, I did not fully appreciate what their tales of fighting and battles meant until I witnessed the daily news reports about the Falklands War (1982)…

… and now we reach the point I want to make: when I mentioned the devastating impact of the sinking of HMS Sheffield on the men and our nation’s chances of winning the Falklands War, my colleagues asked “what was that?” They knew essentially nothing about extreme courage and bravery of the men who fought in South Atlantic. The names and stories of HMS Ardent, HMS Antelope, HMS Coventry, HMS Fearless, RFA Sir Galahad, RFA Sir Tristram and the Atlantic Conveyor were all unknown to them. These key events in our recent history still resonate on world diplomacy today. Yet their knowledge of what happened can be summarised in a single pop-culture sentence: “It was something to do with Thatcher and we won.”

Trying to link this recent history to the warnings that can be drawn from the First Cold War fell on profoundly uniformed and uninterested ears.

Growing up in the closing decades of the First Cold War filled me with a respectful dread for the terrible knife-edge that ideological conflict places the survival of billions people. I remember news reports of mobile US Ground-Launched Cruise Missiles (GLCMs) prowling the English countryside from RAF Greenham Common. Each GLCM had a range of about 2400 miles and could reach Moscow, making most of southern England a target for Soviet missiles. Meanwhile our nuclear-armed submarines were holding a near-silent vigil in the oceans as massed conventional forces held a tense stand-off along the Iron Curtain.

This is just one area where modern Culture is diverging from my own. Reconciling the different perspectives takes patience and energy. Now that the UK is at last recovering from the recession (using the term based on actual experience and not the specialist economic terminology used by reality-denying politicians) caused by the 2007-2008 Financial Crisis, I hope that our society will once again remember the value of the generations learning from each other.