My misadventures with Discovery Health and their appalling service and attitude got me thinking about the economic situation in here - dunno how it compares to the rest of the world but some of the dynamics here are scary ( Read more... )

Discovery Health - a company I would seriously not recommend if you ever have to deal with South Africa in any way are doing their best to piss me off too much to write coherently. Now, ten years back, medical aid (medical insurance) was an agreeable luxury in SA. Private care was better than state care, but state hospitals were still, largely, ( Read more... )

< sarcasm mode on > President il-bob Mugabe, the darling of African leaders (who give him a standing ovation every time he appears), whose brilliance has lead his country to great heights, has recognised the election of his good friend President Ameanihadadinnerjacket (with whom he is good friends, BTW) as free, fair and legitimate, and has urged ( Read more... )

Yeah well. It's been a long week since I posted. Life of a midlist author wannabe-something-better is fairly fraught. Look the reality is in publishing - especially now - everything is slow. I'd been waiting on an advance for a book for some months, and finally got it (of course I'd lost about 20% of the value of it from when it was negotiated ( Read more... )

Well, being mooed may be be better than being booed, but at ten to six this morning the cow sticking its head in my office door was a less than a happy experience. Some 40 of the obstreperous bastards had invaded the garden. Hours of happy fun and trampled plants and large volumes of cowshit ensued ( Read more... )

( Read more... )

My agent Mike has threatened mayhem if he ever gets another rejection from an editor saying a book is 'too traditional'. And another friend of mine got her teens proposal rejected as 'not edgy enough'. A good thing she didn't offer them a 1940 style boarding school story with a bit of magic. That'd never sell a bajillion copies. On an associated ( Read more... )

Sesame Street has a local - SA franchise arrangement of sorts. It's called Takelani-Sesame and includes some local characters. They also produce early readers under the supervision of Sesame in the US ( Read more... )

I'm used to dealing with the weird world of South Africa, and the weirder world of publishing. It's always a bit like looking at existance through a fragile flawed crystal looking glass, which not only shows things bass-ackwards, but frequently with added illusions (and will break if you drop it). Little things like the sales of of new vehicles ( Read more... )

You know, one of the things that goes with being cock-o-whoop that EVERYBODY needs to be nice to (even if they hate and despise you) - like a CEO, a judge, your bank manager, or the cop giving you a ticket, is that you miss learning or forget the social cues that say "Idiot. Wind your stupid neck in before you get your damnfool head chopped off." ( ( Read more... )