I take a keen interest in U.S. politics, regularly listening to podcasts of Meet The Press, Bill Maher’s Real Time and Fareed Zakaria’s GPS. I used to watch CNN’s State of the Union too but that on top of the others was a bit much even for me.

Why do I take this interest? Cynically I will say that U.S. politics is my spectator sport. It certainly is presented quite a lot like entertainment. Non-cynically I would say it is because I believe the battles in U.S. politics are both interesting and extremely important. The decisions America makes will reverberate around the world.

So imagine my surprise when a producer for Fareed Zakaria’s show GPS reached out to me. I had stars in my eyes. Did they want me on the show to talk about my old hobby of going to ruins? Maybe they wanted to discuss how my zombie novels are an incredibly incisive allegory for the state of the world today?

Sadly it was nothing like that. What in fact they wanted was to get the link and attribution for a photo in a post I did years ago about the ruins of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, here.

The image they wanted to know about was the one in the middle, with a top-down shot from one of the swords, with a U.S. Soldier on patrol. It came from a New York Times article. I told them and gave them the attribution, and now I expect they’ll go negotiate for a license to use it. I get nothing, except the satisfied glow of being part of the ‘big game’ ever so briefly.

At the end of GPS Fareed Zakaria always says- “Thank you for being part of my show this week,” which I think always sounds a bit strange, because what did I do? I listened.

Not this time. If you watch GPS in weeks to come and see that image of Iraq pop up, you’ll know it passed through my hands on its way to the small screen, and I made my contribution to the changes in the world.

“Thank you for being part of my show.”

You’re welcome, Fareed :).

Last weekend while I was in Leicester Cathedral, standing by the sleek new tomb for car park King Richard 3, I cast my eye delicately over the tombstones built into the walls and stumbled upon this little beauty.

Humble bragging was a thing even in 1743. What is humble bragging? Bragging about how humble you are. Look at this for the form raised to an art:

Of a most extensive learning, in his own profession eminent

Not aspiring after more Preferments, of much greater Deserving,

Possessed of many Shining Qualities, which his Modesty would have concealed.

Not bad.

Of course, there is always the chance he didn’t write this himself, in which case it’s not really humble bragging, and he was actually a diamond chap.

Amazon offers a number of statistics to authors who publish through them- one of them being Author Rank. I don’t know exactly what goes into calculating it, but it’s most likely a combination of the sales rank (number of sales combined with recency of sales) of all an author’s books, plus perhaps something for number of reviews and maybe even score of those reviews.

I started publishing on Amazon 2 years ago with my 2 collections of short stories, Ignifer’s Rise followed, then my ruins book, then the Ruins War, then zombie books. It’s nice to note there is an upward trend:

This upward trend is not an inevitable result of having more books. If anything, older books that don’t sell are likely (or so I’ve heard) to act as anchors on an overall author’s rank. My older books hardly sell, but the new ones do, so they’re overcoming that drag.

It’s a series of peaks and troughs. Every peak corresponds directly to a time I spent money on promoting a new book. The goal of such promotions is to propel the book into the top 100 of a category bestseller list, where it will become ‘sticky’ thanks to good sales and stay there.

If you look at every spike until mid-2015, I never had that stickiness. There was a spike up to 30-50,000 then rapid drop off back to 100-300,000. But, since May when I released my first zombie book The Last, things changed. The book was sticky enough to keep me within the top 100,000 authors for 3 months. Then release and promotion of book 2 The Lost did the same thing.

What does this mean? Essentially it means more sales, coming more consistently than before. It’s certainly not big sales- at rank 50,000 there are 50,000 authors selling more than me!- but it’s better than before and very encouraging.

What does Amazon use this rank for? It may feed into some kind of predictive algorithm that influences how much visibility a new release gets. If that author has a track record of good sales (high Author Rank), Amazon is more likely to put their new book in front of more people during the release promo window than the book of someone who has never sold a thing.

So, higher rank can lead to a virtuous cycle, as long as consistent releases, quality and promotion allow an author to climb up the visibility stack. I expect zombie book 3 will be out in a month or so, so I should be riding that train OK. Stay tuned for more results in another 3 months.

Last week on Friday we eschewed our normal ‘rush-home-to-watch-TV-and-work/study’ plan and instead went out to the late night opening of the Tate Modern.

Now that is living the London-life. I have no doubt that soon we’ll be out partying with Twiggy and Princess Margaret.

We started by St. Paul’s, went to a burger joint called Porky’s where SY had ribs with a Dr. Pepper sauce and I had the Porky burger with a ‘Porkslap’ beer. Johnny Cash played throughout. Then we did the Tate, which was good but is never as good as the Tate traveling exhibition we saw on our first date many moons ago in the Mori Art Museum in Roppongi, Tokyo.

Still, I harvested a few writing ideas from the weirder bits of art, and it was fun.

The evening ended in the absolutely dead Tate cafe. It was us two and the girl behind the counter doing her sweeping. It felt a bit like the tinny, empty Automat in Dark City (where Rufus Sewell left his wallet, in case you’ve forgotten).

Me in full work regalia in front of St. Paul’s.

Tate across the Millennium Bridge.

Porkslap beer. It did not taste particularly porky. It was very fruity actually.

This was a tasty Porky burger.

St. Paul’s and London in general across the river from 4th floor of Tate Modern at night.

I just wrote a chase/fight scene for Zombie Ocean 3, between Cerulean AKA Robert and a zombie.

Question- Has there ever been a character in a wheelchair in popular zombie lore? It makes for an interesting flip of perspective. Trying to imagine myself into the head and body of a paraplegic person is a challenge. Absent a wheelchair, it’s basically all crawling- dragging these motionless legs behind you like a penance. Hard to escape.

It was the same kind of challenge to write from Anna’s perspective, a 5-year old girl, in Book 2 The Lost. She just couldn’t do much. That she’d been bed-bound for a year only made it worse- she was weak, she had no coordination and little knowledge of the outside world or such basics as what to eat, where to sleep, or even where she lived.

Finding a balance I was happy with took experimentation. To break down every little thought she had, because it would be novel to her, was the first track I took. But then even little things like finding a box to stand on so she could reach the kitchen counter and get bananas became tortuously explained.

My second approach was to just assume a certain level of ability. Just say she got bananas and let it be assumed that she got a box. I’m doing the same with Cerulean. He has hard limits, being paraplegic, but he acts fast and gets it done somehow. Everything is new for him when he gets out of his yearlong stint in bed, but he knows what he wants and pursues it.

The first two parts are done. I’m up to 26,000 words, about a quarter through. Things from hereon will get a little crazy.

I’m an English teacher, I teach students who come from all around the world and want to study at University in the UK. I teach them English, Academic Skills, and a bit of Business English.

Term just started, so I was ‘breaking in’ 6 groups of students. This is always the most wearying time, as any issues with discipline need to be dealt with immediately (you wouldn’t think it was an issue with 18-years old+ students, but a bad attitude in the first class is only going to lead to more problems later on), you need to get to know the students and they need to get to know you, you need to explain all the basics of how the school works, how your class works, how it all goes.

You’re setting a positive routine, like blazing a trail. It’s tiring but fun too, as getting to know the students a little can be fascinating. For example, I’ve got:

• a semi-pro soccer player
• a semi-pro volleyball player
• a saxophonist in a jazz band
• the national dance champion of a South American country

And others. We do simple name games and I get them to tell me the most interesting things about themselves. I start by saying (these days) I write zombie novels. That gives everyone a bit of a laugh (“You can buy them on amazon *wink*,” extends the laugh a bit) and they relax a little. It’s offering a bit of sincerity and asking for some sincerity in exchange.

Almost always it works. and if someone resists, like the guy who answered- “Yeah I wrote a book too, it’s about the history of China, it’s 100 words long,”- then I just pummel them until everyone’s laughing at them rather than with them, and sincerity wins out.

ie- “You wrote a book, really? Stop copying my ideas. Get your own. And 100 words, that’s barely even a tweet. You’re from China right, is the history so unimpressive you can write it in 100 words?”

The guy after this guy, before I’d done some pummeling, said his interesting thing was- “Oh yeah I read his book.”

“That’s pathetic,” I probably said, pummeled a bit back and forth, until finally this second guy admitted he won a basketball championship in elementary school. As soon as he says it his attitude changes. I ask my usual not-joke-but-always-gets-a-laugh: “Oh yeah, can you slam-dunk?”

“Ha ha, I was in elementary school.”

Nonchalant shrug. “Lots of kids can slam-dunk in elementary school. I could.”

All students goggle. What? “Ha ha, no I couldn’t.”

It doesn’t really deserve a laugh but it gets one. We all relax. Guy number 1 realizes now maybe he is missing out. This class is a place for sincerity where sarcasm by anyone except me gets shrift, and I only use sarcasm when I’m fighting fire with fire. Folks have to feel safe and sincere in a language class, or they (at least certainly the less confident ones) will never speak.

Of such brimming wit are my early classes made of. I make mis-steps at times, in my efforts to make not-jokes out of student’s information. One student was from Kazakhstan. Of course I asked- “Have you seen Borat? That’s about Kazakhstan.”

He wasn’t amused. Ah well. In fact in a later class he approached and said- “You shouldn’t ask Kazakh people about Borat, they will get very upset.”

“Ah right, are you upset?”

“No, but I’m different.”

I Googled ‘Kazakh angry Borat’ to check out the true feelings. I found this website- http://stopborat.net/about.php . It says:

“We are a collectiv of common conscientious citizens of Kazakhstan who can’t tolerate when someone puts mocking on us. We demand that everyone on the world takes us seriously and knows that we are serious peoples, like Uzbekistan.”

At first I thought it might be serious, then cracked up at the comparison to Uzbekistan. I guess Sacha Baron Cohen put this little beauty up too. It made me think, is it cruel? Are they over-reacting, to get upset? It is funny though. I probably won’t mention it again.