Sugar (and books)

It’s true that eating too much sugar is bad for you. Too much of anything is bad for you. Even water (I rarely touch the stuff myself, having kept pet fish and observed what they do in it).

Yet, having no sugar is bad for you too. Okay, you can get a lot of it as sugar in fruit (in season) and your liver can make sugar out of some other foodstuffs but you have to remember that your body works on sugar. That’s its fuel. Cut out all sugar, all carbohydrate, and your metabolism will burn protein for energy and you will go into ketosis. That is definitely not healthy.

It’s worse with salt. Too much salt is bad, yes, but a little too much is no problem. Your kidneys will dump the excess. It’s what they do. Too little salt – well, your body cannot create sodium. It’s an element. If you have too little, then hyponatremia beckons and if you persist in your salt-free diet while getting sicker, you will die.

Maybe this is a population-thinning exercise. It’ll certainly wipe out the genes of people who put healthy kids on salt, sugar and gluten free vegan diets. A global experiment in Darwinism, maybe?

Lately we have the gobby kitchen staff, in the grinning shape of Jamie Oliver, demanding all breakfast cereals reduce their sugar content. Yes, he’s self-promoting again.

It is worth pointing out every time, that this flabby-tongued gobshite has never been elected to anything, has no medical background, is neither a nutritionist nor a dietitian, and makes pronouncements to get people to notice him.

He is a cook. Since when did business boardrooms and elected MPs take orders from kitchen staff?

They do though. He has one of his tantrums and they all go ‘ooo, the Dreaded Cook is coming, we have to reformulate everything so it tastes like a troupe of weasels peed over it and then nobody will buy it’.

Stupid, isn’t it? But that’s how the world works now. Gobby bastards who have never stood for any kind of election and who have no qualifications in the subject they are spouting off about are the ones being listened to by our vacuous elected representatives.

Every political party should have ‘superficial preening party’ as at least part of their name. Every one. None of them are any use any more. There are very, very few MPs with any brains at all. Load of prancing popinjays who think they have been voted in to do what the hell they please to the people who voted for them.

This is where Cromwell came in last time the government was so out of touch. They won’t know that because they have fucked up education so badly now that history students think Henry the Eighth was the spitting image of Idi Amin and they don’t remember what happened last time we had a King Charles. It was even worse the time before and we’ll soon have Charles III. Who is already bonkers so he has a head start on the first two.

It’s all coming together very unpleasantly, I think…

We’re still in January. We are expected to eat only vegan food and touch no alcohol this month. As you would expect, I have had not one meat-free or whisky-free day this month and have no plans to do so. If they move the Stoptober nonsense into January we can just rename it Miserable Puritan Month and get it all out of the way at the start of the year.

Government by gobshite. Who’d have thought it could come to this? All we have in Parliament is a bunch of mindless expenses claimants who do what they are told by charities and kitchen staff. People who claim to be experts but who are only expert in self-aggrandisement and thuggish controlling methods.

Anyway… the next book from Leg Iron Books is going to piss off these people massively. It has lots and lots of smoking and booze in it, and it’s extremely funny. A complex plot that leads to a logical conclusion – and when you get to the part with the chugger, I reckon every reader is going to have to wipe tears of laughter from their eyes. Unless you’re a chugger, in which case you might want to be a little less aggressive in the future.

It’s by Lee Bidgood, who has appeared in the last two Underdog Anthologies and it’s a really good one. Target is release by the end of the month (my visit to Wales in January has been postponed because of a reason) and it’s certainly possible.

On book promotions, I was sent a link by an early author, Justin Sanebridge, to a promoting site that sends out tweets, farcebok posts, Google+ posts (whatever they are) and more to advertise a book. They also have a free sample that sends it out once so you can try it.

The base 30-day plan costs just $14.99 (currently £10.80) to get it sent out twice a day for 30 days. At 50 cents a day that’s pretty cheap. I will send one book a month for this promotion. If I send them all at once I’ll have books competing with other books from the same publisher (me) and I want to see if it affects sales. If it makes $15 a month it’s a good one.

But hey, if anyone wants to use the free one-day thing to give their book a shot now, go for it. if you want to use the paid service yourself, tell me you did it so I’ll be able to link it to sales.

First one out is Justin Sanebridge’s ‘The Goddess of Protruding Ears’ because he found the site so that’s only fair. I have 30 days to decide whether to do the rest in order or at random. I might not add the anthologies because they are priced to the bone so they’d have trouble getting the initial stake back. They’d be bottom of the list anyway – the authors go first.

An advertising budget of $15 a month won’t break me. If it works, if it makes more than the stake, they have heavier-duty plans I could move up to. Advertising budget is tax deductible too.

Which reminds me, I have a chunky tax bill to pay this year. I don’t want to give money to people I know will use it to make my life a misery, I’d rather give it to a trembling street corner junkie who will only damage themselves, but they’ll come for me if I don’t.

First tax bill in years. I am sure I will be claiming a lot of it back next year though.