Happy Ending

- Will you tell me a story?

- What kind of a story?

- One with a happy ending.

- Come here, then.

- Alright.

- There was a village on a far off world.

- Which world?

- It’s called Nyay, and it’s in our galaxy on the far side of the Oort Cloud.

- Wow. What’s it like on their planet?

- It’s a hot, dry planet. Only 29% of their world is covered with water.

- Oh.

- So there are not as many people as on our planet. Only five hundred million or so. Amongst them was a lovely family who lived in a simple home and had kind faces. They had a pet, a skinny brown animal called a nafneng.

- What was its name?

- Chimba.

- That’s a good name. Was it a boy or a girl?

- A girl. The father of the family was called Spoodama. The mother was called Gellim. The children were called Stovit, a girl, and Bijjish, a boy. They were a farming family. Every year, the crops grew all summer in the hot sun, and the harvest was not great but it was enough. The children went to school, and they were happy.

- Okay. And Chimba was happy too.

- Yes, she was a happy dog. She loved her family, and she was not too naughty.

- What kind of naughty things did she do?

- Sometimes if you had a piece of food in your hand and you let your hand down by your side -

- Oh, like Tilda!

- Yes, just like Tilda. If you got distracted, she would tease the food out of your hand and eat it, and when you brought your hand up -

- You’d find it empty, and go, ‘Oh, Til- Chimba!’

- That’s right.

- As the years went by and Stovit and Bijjish grew up and became interested in the world outside the village that their teacher had taught them about.

- Did they learn about us in the school?

- Us?

- Us, here on Earth.

- Yes, they learned about Earth. They learned that our planet is small, wet and cold, and that we have long winters, and they would pretend to shiver in their hot classrooms and laugh.

- Oh, Earth is so cold!

- Yes, like that! Now as time passed, the summers in the village grew longer and hotter. The sun would hang over Spoodama’s back as he worked the fields, and we would water the plants with his own sweat, but he never complained. He loved his family, and he knew that a good person would suffer for those he loved.

- Like you, Dad.

- Perhaps. In any case, as the summers grew longer and hotter, the crops became less bountiful, and the meals of the Nyayvian family grew smaller. Gellim and Spoodama worried but also knew that worrying would not change anything. After a while, Stovit got sick.

- Did she get a day off school?

- She did. In fact, she got several days off school. In total, with all the visits from the doctor, and all the journeys to the medical centre in the nearby village, she did not go to school for one hundred days.

- A hundred!

- And even when she did go back to school, she was still weak and could no longer take part in gymnastics lessons, which she had loved.

- Oh. Poor Stovit.

- Chimba also had less to eat, and so she became skinny and her ribs stuck out.

- Oh. Poor Chimba. What about Bijjish?

- Bijjish did okay to start with, but his stomach rumbled loudly when he was with his friends, and this embarrassed him.

- Burble blurble, oops!

- Exactly.

- Did the summers get any shorter? Did the rains come?

- Spoodama and Gellim hoped very much that they would. They dreamed of cooler days and water landing on their brow from the sky. They looked at each other and told each other that the rains would come. If not soon, eventually. The universe would be kind to them.

- And what happened?

- The cooler days and the rains did not come. The summers stretched on and on. The clouds would begin to gather and darken. Bijjish would go outside to watch them, making spit in his dry mouth. He saw his own spirit run forwards out of him, tearing off its shirt, whooping with delight and being soaked by phantom rains.

- And did it rain?

- It did not. The clouds that had gathered simply dissipated, and summer would go on for more days and more weeks.

- And what about the farm?

- The harvest from the farm was especially poor that year, and the family could only eat two meals per day. And then Gellim got pregnant. Spoodama talked about taking Chimba away to another place and coming back without her.

- Oh no!

- But Gellim forbade him, and he relented. They were all very skinny by now, and then Stovit got sick again, and she did not return to school.

- What, never?! When is it going to rain?

- Well, then it did rain, but it was not good.

- Oh?

- The fields had grown dry and dusty, and when the rains came they washed all of the top soil away and much of the crops floated away. Bijjish came running out of school to try to collect as many as he could with his father, but they were left with very little.

- Oh no. Couldn’t somebody help them?

- Normally, the people in the village helped each other when misfortune fell on this family or that. The elder of the village taught them to do so for the greater good. But now everyone was in the same situation, and there was nobody to help them.

- What did they do?

- News came of another place a long way to the south called Fatam where water ran in the rivers all year and the summers were not so severe. Other families began to pack up their things and set off to Fatam. Gellim and Spoodama argued about this. Gellim thought they should go, but Spoodama looked at her huge belly and at the weak, bedbound Stovit and shook his head.

- Couldn’t they build a cart and carry them?

- They could, and Spoodama knew that, but it would be hard for him and Bijjish to carry them along with all their possessions. And so, with the food running out day by day, they stayed.

- Oh dear. They should have gone with their neighbours.

- They waited until Gellim gave birth to a baby boy, whom they adored from his first breath, and they called him Shask, which means ‘monsoon’.

- Then they did they go to Fatam.

- They did set off to Fatam. Stovit was tucked up in the cart with Shask, and bony Bijjish and Spoodama took one of the protruding wooden rods each and pulled.

- Did Chimba go with them?

- Chimba did go with them,. On the way they passed a small farm with noknoks, which are like our Earth chickens but much sillier. Chimba was so hungry she did something she had never done before. She ran into the farm and snapped at the neck of one of the noknoks and killed it.

- Oh no! Chimba! What’s going to happen?!

- The owner of the farm threw a heavy rock at Chimba which hit her hard on the head. Chimba yelped and ran away. Bijjish saw that she was bleeding. He tried to clean the wound, but it was difficult with the little water they had.

- Poor Chimba. They shouldn’t have thrown that rock.

- Sadly the owners of the farm were scared and hungry, so they resorted to violence to protect what little they had.

- Dad, are you sure this story is going to have a happy ending?

- Let’s see.

- Okay.

- They walked on, hour after hour and day after day past the scorched fields of their country. Bijjish noticed that Chimba was staggering a little and tried to swat away the swarm of vipids, which are like flies, that kept landing on her wound, but it didn’t do much good.

- What would Doctor Belkin say?

- Doctor Belkin would say that the wound should be thoroughly cleaned with alcohol and bandaged up, and that Chimba should be assessed for brain damage from the impact.

- But they couldn’t do that.

- No, they couldn’t do any of those things. In fact, there was only one thing they could do.

- Walk.

- And walk they did. They panted to the top of small hills in the dizzying heat with the small cart and rolled to the bottom on the other side. At night, Gellim, Stovit and Shask slept together in the cart, and Bijjish and Spoodama took turns to sleep under the cart while they other watched the road ahead and behind and the dark fields around them.

- What did they eat?

- They had taken all their food with them when they left the village but, as their neighbours were weeks ahead of them, they had no one to ask how long the journey would take. They decided only to eat one meal a day, except for Gellim, who had to feet Shask. Stovit ate as much as she could but for some reason she was never very hungry. Chimba was always sniffing around for something to eat, but she didn’t steal any more noknoks.

- I hope they get to Fatam soon.

- So did they. Unfortunately, the next night bandits crept up on them so steathily that they were almost upon the cart before Bijjish could raise the alarm. Spoodama awoke at once, and he and Bijjish began to fight them off, but the bandits were armed with knives, and all he and Bijjish had were their farmer’s hoe and fork.

- Did they get anything?

- A lot. They took the family’s blankets, which kept them warm at night, and a lot of their remaining food. And Spoodama was badly hurt.

- And Chimba?

- Chimba was very slow by now and a bit stupid. She ran away and barked at the bandits from a distance.

- At least she didn’t get hurt again.

- Thank goodness for small mercies. Spoodama cleaned up his wounds as best he could and applied a tourniquet. Then the family all tucked themselves in the cart to share body warmth for the rest of the night, but it was too cold for little Shask. In the morning, his little body was still.

- Ohhhh!

- Spoodama cut off a lock of hair from his head and gave it to Gellim, who sniffed it and sobbed, sucking in great mouthfuls of air as she did so, as Spoodama dug a tiny grave by the side of the road. They commended Shask’s spirit to the divine and went on their way, leaving the little pile of stones growing smaller behind them.

- Poor little Shask. No happy ending for him.

- I suppose not. In any case, they were all weaker and skinnier now than ever, and now the way became steeper and steeper, and they were forced to climb the largest hill that any of them had ever seen. It was incredibly difficult for them to push the cart up the hill, even with only Stovit and now Chimba inside and their other few possessions. Every time they thought they were approaching the top, they found it was still further away, and they continued to push and stumble up the hill.

- Oh, poor them.

- One small mercy was that the sun was on the other side of the hill, so it was not too hot, but still they pushed and climbed and pushed.

- Did they get to the top?

- They did. And when they got there, the land flowed all the way down through a valley full of marvellous little buildings and into a great blue expanse.

- The sea!

- They stood there looking down at the sea or a large lake anyway, knowing now that they would make it. But then Stovit said ‘Oh. Chimba.’

- Oh no! Oh, Chimba. Oh no!

- Little Chimba had curled up next to Stovit and grown ever so still and cold.

- But Dad you said it was going to be a happy ending! But Chimba and Shask are gone! How can it be happy?!

The father reached down, touched his son’s wet face and looked into his shining eyes, tears that were not for himself but for the troubles of a family far, far away on a planet called Nyay.

- Don’t you see? It was.

Wishing Upon a Star: How To Interpret a Bad Review

I recently noticed that I had obtained my first bad review from one AlexN in October last year, who granted a single star. The individual also commented, “Unnecessarily wordy which made it a slog to get through.” While I wonder about the mentality of a person prepared to give a worst possible score over a stylistic disagreement, I must thank AlexN for finally providing the impetus to write about how a published writer may interpret the star ratings granted by their readers.

The five-star rating system is well known. It provides the first five positive natural numbers of which any can be selected to evaluate the quality of a product or service. On some parts of its website, Goodreads provides vernacular interpretations of each rating; 1 means ‘did not like it’, 2 means ‘it was ok’, 3 means ‘liked it’, 4 means ‘really liked it’, and 5 means ‘it was amazing’. We can clearly see that the rating giver is assumed to be making a statement about their subjective experience of the thing or experience they paid for (or otherwise obtained).

The evaluative tool is designed to collect data from a large number of purchasers, from which the mean can be calculated and shown to future shoppers. If the central tendency of the set of star ratings is not enough, you can usually click a link to see how many reviewers selected each of the five ratings as well as any qualitative feedback, such as AlexN’s above.

In general, however, one searches for a desired thing, several items fitting the search criteria are shown, and the mean star rating for each is shown. Despite what we know to be the source of this datum, it is all too easy - in my opinion - to read the number as an objective measure of the quality of the thing for sale. One can feel positively squeamish about purchasing an item despite costing several currency units less if we find that its mean rating is, say, 0.6 stars less than that of the more expensive item. Why? Because, in something like Goodreads’ parlance, it’s ‘not as good’. Yet consider the case of my debut novel Glassworld: Out of the Darkness, which had obtained an average score of 4.8 with five reviews, and this dropped 0.6 stars to 4.2 as the result of a single low score.

Returning to the data, it is quite surprising to discover that a process can begin with an enquiry along the lines of ‘What did you think of this?’ and somehow transform the response into a number which appears to represent ‘This is how good this is’. I suppose the idea is that all opinions are basically equal, and that an objective composite or meta-opinion can be created using basic arithmetic. (Though, I should add that A****n modifies the value of a star rating based on how recent it was or how ‘trustworthy’ the online store considers the rating to be, so the above arithmetic was not duplicated exactly online.)

However, I don’t think this is defensible in the case of a book.

Perhaps, in the case of distinct manufactured goods whose actual conditions can vary based on the quality of their individual components and the expertise used to assemble them, store them and carry them to their destinations, the reviewer makes something more like an objective assessment of the product. In that case, analysing the ratings and their distribution may give us useful information about the probability that our purchase would arrive intact.

But a book, aside from any issues with the production quality or manner of carriage, is not like this. In the vast majority of cases, there is no discernible difference between my 2004 copy of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and yours. Therefore, any difference in our evaluation of that work cannot be objective, or else we would both simply give it five stars to show that it had been printed, bound and delivered using effective methods, or less if otherwise.

Indeed, it may be because multi-department online shops feature electronic and mechanical goods alongside printed works using the same review system that we are so easily confused by their meaning. In any case, I wish to present my own system for understanding the user-provided feedback in such cases where production quality is probably not what is being evaluated. This may be of use to writers or purchasers of books.

I suggest that, instead of considering a star-rating to be either a subjective or objective review of the book, that it be the reader’s subjective review of themselves, specifically where they lie within the natural audience of the work. Thus, with apologies to Goodreads, 5 means ‘I am at the centre of the intended audience for this work’, 4 means ‘I am well within the intended audience for this work’, 3 means ‘I am on the border of the intended audience for this work’, 2 means ‘I am outside the intended audience for this work’ and 1 means ‘I am well outside the intended audience for this work’. I believe this is a reasonable interpretation because the quality of the text itself cannot change from one reader to the next, but the readers themselves can vary wildly in literacy, expectations, hermeneutics, interests, reading history, and so on.

The immediate value of this interpretation is that none of the ratings speak directly about the quality of the text, so none of them are directly critical of it. What they do is collectively build up an image of how well the book is reaching its intended audience and whether it is being promoted beyond that audience or not. This immediately creates some interesting results. For example, under the objective result system, a score of 5.0 is a perfect score. Under the reader-self-evaluation system, it implies that the book has had very little reach beyond precisely the kind of person the writer or marketing department had in mind for it. Whereas a spread of scores that encompasses some 5s, plenty of 4s, lots of 3s, some 2s and a handful of 1s suggests that the book has enjoyed a healthy reception across a diverse audience.

It should be noted that the score is retrospective upon (presumably) finishing the book. A reader who initially doubted the book might not be for them but were ultimately charmed by it might give it a 4 or even a 5-star rating, and vice versa; a reader who thought they loved that kind of thing but were ultimately disappointed might give it a lower score. Unfortunately or otherwise, the system will not speak of such conversions as readers do not say what score they think they will give the book before reading it.

In conclusion, my book, which now enjoys four 5-star reviews, one 4-star review and one 1-star review, has until now been struggling to emerge from the very heart of its audience, but has at last met someone from outside the warm appreciation of that beloved group. This is all well and good for Glassworld. The novel was written to change hearts and minds, and it may well be that readers like AlexN, who “slog” through my book but nevertheless do finish it, are precisely the unconverted to whom I most wish to preach.

So, one star reviews? Bring ‘em on! The more, the better!

Talking About Yourself in the Third Person

I was asked a question recently, which I paraphrase here, "Why is it easier for Sam to modify their behaviour when they say 'Sam doesn't do that sort of thing?'" Here is my answer:

I suppose you mean it is easier than if you had made the equivalent statement in the first person as well as if you hadn't made the statement at all.

If so, we should consider the difference between Sam saying to themselves, 'I don't eat a whole packet of biscuits in one go' and their saying, 'Sam doesn't eat a whole packet of biscuits in one go'.

I can't help seeing an externalisation of will taking place akin to the Feng Shui practice of imagining a royal dragon as your guest and trying to make your home appealing to them. Jo might be prepared to live in a dark, squalid, cluttered home but not be able to assume that such an honoured and noble invitee would wish to enter a home in such a state. Even so, it is Jo who makes the judgements that lead to the two markedly different presentations of their home.

In Sam's case, the assertion in the first person might collapse because they know that they bloody well did pig the lot only two nights ago. By contrast, the same assertion in the third person creates somebody called 'Sam' in Sam's mind. 'Sam' cannot be the same 'Sam' - from Sam's perspective - that is denoted by the perpendicular pronoun a) because 'I' has a unique self-intimacy and b) because anyone addressed in the third person is not 'me' and not 'you'. They are outside the conversation and not directly addressable. They are a person, and a whole person, apart and separate from anybody in this exchange. They have their rights and views and Sam cannot presume to modify them in their narrow self-interest.

But a trick is being played by Sam upon themselves because this 'Sam' really is Sam, what 'Sam' wants really is what Sam wants, and - crucially - what 'Sam' doesn't do really is what Sam doesn't do.

So Sam, in an existential sense, gets to have their cake and eat it (but still not the biscuits). They be themselves, they create an alternative persona with a better ethical code than they've got, and then they realign the two like a car joining a motorway from a slip road, without actually allowing the whole system to collapse into the 'I' whose ethical consistency can be overturned by basic gluttony.

It is more subtle than the dragon method, due to the linguistic prestidigitation involved, but it's fundamentally the same mental process.

A Thousand Leagues Away

Why can I never find the words to say,
as you hold my dreams and them defend,
I feel you a thousand leagues away?

The thought of you is many-hued ray,
and your warmth floods my own dark blood.
Why can I never find the words to say?

I can find you in the green and grey
of moss and slate; I know my friend,
and I feel you a thousand leagues away.

That's where I left you anyway.
It broke my heart to tear these continents apart.
Why can I never find the words to say

that, though we frolicked in a meadow and were gay,
to build a castle, my left slipped your right hand,
and now I feel you a thousand leagues away?

I made the night time to separate the days,
and, seeing how I do not sleep, you somehow understand
why I can never find the words to say
that I feel you a thousand leagues away.

Looking for My Name

I'm looking for my name.
Have you seen it?

It cannot be
a sound invented
by someone else
before I could speak
because your name is invented 

only by you.

Nor can it be
a sound copied
from man to child
across so many centuries
nobody really knows
where it came from
because I know
where my name comes from.

It comes from
the deepest part of me,
deep and dark and wet,
where muscles pound
and light is myth.

It comes from
the tenderest part of me,
which I'm afraid to touch
in case I feel
the flickering of eyelashes
magnified by a million.

It comes from
the youngest part of me,
as young as the unborn future,
so young
it is coming into being
forever.

So I know where my name comes from,
but that doesn't help me know
where it is.

It's in an unnamed place
as layered as road
as hidden as hurt
as alive as magma.

And when I find it,
I will carry it to the Sun
in the East,
hold it up
in my two hands
and blow.