READING DURING LOCKDOWN, BUT NOT BOOKS: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

And with a bolt of light bursting through the broken boards of the arched window, our villain, Vampire Added Tax on e-books, was rendered into dust.

   Alice, in Taxation Wonderland, may be rather perplexed at the notion of a sales tax simply going away. Hardback and paperpack books were (and remain) VAT-free. E-books join the ranks of the taxless.

   It’ll take a wee while to filter through the system, and I’ll check prices accordingly. What do I mean by that? Five single stories, combined, add up to twice the cost of an omnibus edition. Once the adjustment goes through, I want to make sure that the omnibus edition still works out at half-price. That’s the point of the bundle.

   (All the Value Added Tax notes added to my stories faded away during the writing of this blog post.)

   What made e-books different from book-books, that meant they had to be taxed at a greater rate? Who decides when a thing is classed as a taxable electronic service, rather than non-taxable physical tangible goods?

   “When I tax a thing,” the VATMAN said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”

   Alice looked round, like a ball, and decided that when the VATMAN taxed a thing, it would always mean more.

   But today, for once, it means less.

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In other news, there’s no news to speak of. What did you do during the lockdown-so-far? Of course I finished all the unread books on my shelf – in my dreams. Reading those books while I run the house FROM the house and FROM the house alone – that’s a task that’ll take up too much time.

   Running the house from within the house, and staying away from other places that help to run a house, is a destructive force when it comes to reading books and not a constructive one. A restrictive force, better to say. One slip in isolation and isolation isn’t that isolating. It’s potentially lethal.

   You start reading articles instead of books. That’s where the reading time goes. I gather snippets of news around me, though try not to be smothered by them. Coronavirus affects the elderly. Except that it affects the young, too. And it affects animals in zoos. With any luck, the virus will start a war with itself and disappear up its own non-existent anus.

   I’ve looked at the diagram, and the virus doesn’t have an anus. This won’t stop the virus acting like an arsehole, and definitely won’t stop people from ascribing non-virus features to the virus.

   Gorsh, I feel seen, said the virus, laughing out of the side of its non-existent mouth, knowing that it couldn’t be seen with the naked eye. It’s even harder to see with a clothed eye, now that I think about it.

   What the hell takes up my book-reading time, instead, then, besides reading virus-related articles? I’ve been reading pamphlets. No one is posting those through my letterbox. These are special boxed pamphlets called rulebooks.

   I read up on these to refresh my memory in advance of playing a whole swathe of boardgames intergalactically. Canada is a universe away. I was invited to pop up at an unspecified time (post-quarantine, one imagines) for a really great $2.50 slice of pizza.

   Call me sceptical, but something tells me there are hidden costs to the bargain. I suspect air travel would put a large jet-sized dent in any Canadian dollars I proffered in exchange for this outstanding pizza.

   Air travel will return, and it may even be cheaper than before. But not cheap enough to be handed change from a ticket and a pizza slice out of a ten-dollar note.

   I run a boardgame channel on the interwebs. (REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.) It’s a boardgame channel to keep in line with the intergalactically recognised format on hashtags – no spaces. If I play a board game and tell the world of this, it’s a #boardgame event.

   Lately, it’s been all-go backstage, as I kept busy testing my ability to run a game in one part of the world for a player on another slice of the planet. That player is the author K. Woodward, who teamed up with me to tackle a few cooperative games that erupted onto the table during many a digression.

   Basically, we turned up for the banter and a game invaded our meandering conversations. And that’s as it should be. The point of gameplay videos was always to stroll in and waffle nonsense as a game played out.

   When I researched the landscape to see what boardgame channels were like, I soon discovered the type of video I wanted to be furthest from. (I have the strange sensation that I’ve blogged about this before, but I can find no record of it in the archive. Let’s have the story all over again, for the first or second time.)

   Scene one. It is the only scene. The gaming video to end all gaming videos. This is filmed on a potato of a phone in a log cabin lit by home-made candle. The bear-grease sputters and interferes with the quality of the picture.

   It’s true to say that the quality of the picture also interferes with the quality of the picture. The shadowy table is made shadowy by the presence of a man in a lumberjack shirt – his sleeve pops into view from time to time.

   This man’s name is Hrmugafmurty, and his best friend is his hunting buddy Zeke. Hrmugafmurty’s main pursuit in life appears to be the attainment of Wilford Brimley levels of diabeetus.

   He has the beard of a defeated prospector which, candy-floss-like, occasionally intrudes upon the sputtering bear-scented scene in the log cabin’s smokiest corner. I’m not sure if it’s snowing inside. Perhaps his beard is emitting more smoke than the candle is.

   Let us dwell, overlong, perhaps, on the grainy footage of a grainy game. In a fever-dream, I believe the game board is made of wood. This explains the grain. Or most of it. On closer inspection, I realise that there can be no closer inspection of footage filmed on a potato of a phone.

   Hrmugafmurty explains, between diphtherial wheezes, that he and his buddy Zeke mugged a shopkeeper found an old copy of the game PanzerKüche in a delightful out-of-the-way bookshop. Sadly, the gamer – part-walrus, part-sugar – proceeds to describe this game in detail as the candle burns to the end of its beaver-tail wick.

   At that point, to prevent the loss of 98% of my water content, avoiding the fate known as spontaneous boardgame combustion, I turn the sound down. Hrmugafmurty’s video is so dry that the film-stock, even though digital, bubbles and festers and collapses in webby shreds on a now-blank screen.

   There are 329 more videos like this, each grainier than the next and the last – which, believe me, is one fucking defiant act of rebellion against the laws of physics. Buddy Zeke appears in exactly 0 of those videos, having been brained by the blunt defective end of a pickaxe in one of Hrmugafmurty’s few moments of clarity, some years before.

   Old Gaming Buddy Zeke is merely alive in the memory of a man who consumed too much sugar and not enough sense. Zeke’s last resting-place is a hundred feet due south of the cabin, around twenty feet into the forbidding line of trees and a good 25 feet down in a shaft braced as well as a defeated prospector can manage.

   To avoid creating gaming videos that dry, first hydrate so you can survive watching them. Watch them. Vow never to make them. Backstage with K. Woodward, playing these rehearsal boardgames in advance of filming game sessions, we regularly veered off into other territories.

   I move my pawn two regions and add a +1 token.

   No. We didn’t play that way. Her construction magnate from Pandemic woke in a five-star hotel, raised her sleep-mask to reveal fantastic eyeliner and immaculate bed-hair, and took an international call from my grumpy transportation expert. We played characters and created mini-stories against the game’s broader backdrop.

   And we laughed. No one developed diabeetus. Bear-fat candles weren’t in evidence. We’d win, we’d lose, and, regardless…we had fun. Hrmugafmurty never has fun in his videos. The death of his hunting pal weighs heavy on his conscience. He’s stuck staggering through solo slogs of PanzerKüche – and the game clearly isn’t built for that style of play.

   No, I haven’t been devouring books during lockdown. Unless you count rulebooks. I don’t count rulebooks. They are pamphlets. The more modern the game, the shorter the rules. Not true, case by case, but we like to think it’s a general trend.

   The PanzerKüche rulebook is thick enough to protect the reader from a T-34 assault, and is listed so far back in the wargame database that the year of publication is noted by means of carbon dating. And that…is a boardgaming fact.

   I was too busy reading rulebooks and preparing games for use in fun-based activities. That’s why I haven’t dented the unread book mountain. Also, if I took a book from the unread book mountain, I fear an avalanche of untaxed physical tangible book-shaped boulders. Enough to knock me into Wonderland, never mind the middle of next week.

THE IN-BOX: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

What should you expect to find in your in-box if you write books?
   Requests for help. These tend to arrive in the form of entreaties from Nigerian Princesses living in France.
   Rolex watch adverts.
   Plugs for earplugs.
   Viagra. Always the female variety.
   Urgent confidential requests for aid that I never open. So I can't tell you how much money these people want from me.
   This week, I was spammed by a mysterious character. Me. WTF?! Yes. I received an e-mail from myself. It was urgent that I answer this and deal with it. Vital that I check the enclosed attachment.
   Hmm.
   I don't recall writing that one. Or, indeed, sending it. Peculiarly, I have no urgent desire to respond. Hmm.
   Was my e-mail account hacked? No. Sooner or later - and in my case it's been later - you may be spammed by someone pretending to be you.
   I suppose this is designed to catch people who e-mail themselves. Do I e-mail myself? Technically, yes.
   This blog is e-mailed to me as an additional form of archiving. It's quite clear what the incoming e-mail is about. No mystery. And no urgent request.
   Almost all junk, spam, is filtered. Either I never see it or I only note its presence in the filtered folder before flushing occurs.

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Rarely, important e-mail is accidentally filtered out as junk. I believe I've caught it all, so far.

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And the rest? How important is e-mail? You can reach me at the listed e-mail address. Doesn't mean you want to, and doesn't mean you should.
   I deal with other writers on a regular bassoon. We talk of many things: shoes, ships, sealing-wax, cabbages, kings and desperate men.
   E-mail is important.
   When I update a book by altering the blurb or the price, Amazon e-mails me to say the updated book is now live.
   So far I've dealt with legal issues through e-mail and not the courts.
   Payment is noted via e-mail. This is the digital age, and authors should not be paid twice a year. I don't have a paper publishing company dawdling in the background.
   E-mail is relatively swift, and problems can be set right rapidly. Doesn't mean they will be. But the option is there.
   Writers. Check your in-boxes. Yes. Writers need more than one box. I have at least...oh dear. Let me think. Damn, is it seven boxes now? Yes. All tailored to different levels of e-mail traffic.
   My busiest in-box is the one visible on this blog. It is tied to my Twitter account, and I take loads of incoming waffle. But I think that's important.
   I don't routinely Tweet my book links on the Twitter. My best responses come through talking about coffee or showing pictures of ice cream.
   In other words, I try my best to stay human. Even if the content of my in-box appears generated by robots. I can't act that way.

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This blog post was about being sent spam by my evil clone. I had nothing grand or revelatory to say on the business of e-mail. Keep a lid on it...
  Generate the ability to know, looking at the e-mail's subject, whether that message will be useful or not. Occasionally, I've been caught out by a monitor warning me that my outgoing e-mail title might constitute spam.
   Would I like to alter the title? Yes. That's been surprising. Why is this phrase or that word considered spam?
   Don't mention help in an e-mail subject. Try to avoid saying hello in the title. If you hold a doctorate, make no mention of this in the intro.
   Above all, omit the name Sani Abacha from your scribblings. There's no Swiss legacy waiting to be unlocked.
   Must see to my e-mail.