Juliet E. McKenna

I’ve posted my thoughts on Digital Microbusiness Action Group, the little blog site I set up to see how many folk I could gather together, since all my pals with campaigning experience reckon working collectively carries more weight than individual voices.

The more voices in a group, the more weight it carries. If this concerns you directly as someone engaged in small scale e-commerce, please consider signing up. No fees, no obligations, no pack drill. It’s a place to find information for yourselves and to help supply (minimal) information to the government departments who’ve been making such far-reaching decisions on what’s demonstrably been inadequate knowledge.

That’s it for today.

I don’t know anyone in the book trade who doesn’t want to see Amazon pay a fair rate of tax. Gaming the existing system is one reason why they’ve been able to wreak havoc across the industry with predatory pricing and other tactics. Making them pay fair taxes would go some way to levelling the playing field. Unfortunately the way this is now being done will cause a lot of collateral damage. The further you go down the publishing scale, the worse the damage becomes.

This new system’s* been set up on the assumption that the majority of ebook sales are through third party vendors. That is perfectly true. Amazon in particular has a grip on that market which is now set to become a stranglehold. Because it’s nowhere near the whole story. It’s become very apparent that the authorities who set all this up have been missing a big piece of the picture. (Yes, I know I’m mixing metaphors.)

Firstly, yes, Amazon – and Google Play, and iBooks – all take a hefty cut of any revenue from the ebooks you sell through them, 30-70% depending on the deal you sign up for. Which is a non-negotiable deal, let’s not forget. You tick a box agreeing to Terms & Conditions which they can vary at any time, as they see fit. Unless you’re Behemoth Books, in which case you can negotiate your own terms, but no one without that kind of clout can hope for anything better.

Also, to use a couple of mythical examples, if you’re Behemoth Books, dealings through Amazon will be a big chunk of your business but you’ll have other revenue streams, notably but not limited to hard copy sales. But Back Bedroom Books of Chipping Norton, who’s an entirely digital publisher, maybe aspiring to offering print on demand editions one day in the future? Sales through these 3rd parties are a much bigger share of their total income, as the price for visibility and availability via Kindle or Nook or whatever.

At the moment at least, Back Bedroom Books can also offer .epub and .mobi files direct from their own website and keep all the revenue. They can do that for a short, exclusive period before the book goes to wider distribution, letting valued customers and a writer’s most loyal fans know where they can get the new book first, thus getting the maximum benefit from that first rush of sales. The customer pays the same price in the end after all, so readers don’t lose out. Those direct sales matter, and the smaller the operation, the more they matter.

But as of 1st Jan 2015, Back Bedroom Books and its equivalents will have to shut their online stores. For some operations, that’ll put enough of a dent in their revenues that they will no longer be viable businesses. So their anthologies showcasing and supporting new authors will be no more. The more established authors’ backlists which they might have published, and the quirky side projects, novelettes and novellas which the big publishers decline won’t be available. Which will be a blow to authors who are increasingly turning to such projects to bolster their dwindling income from advances and royalties.

Will that really matter to readers? Well, it will if your favourite writer can no longer afford to write. There are other issues as well. Amazon – and the others – aren’t necessarily always best placed to trade e-books across Europe. They have their own issues with territoriality and availability. Some stories I’ve heard about trying to buy UK published ebooks in Ireland are mind-boggling, if publishing and licensing contracts – and the DRM software that derives from them – consider Ireland to be part of Europe, which of course it is. Depending on which English language rights the publisher holds, it may simply not be available. Life can be particularly fun in Belfast, with a credit card from a UK bank that allows you to buy the book you want, if the inner workings of your e-reader have missed out on the last century of British Isles’ history and think that the entire island of Ireland is one country and so that counts as a cross-border sale into the EU where you’re not licensed to read it. So you can’t. Yes, I was astonished the first time I heard one of these tales of woe.

And let’s not forget that from time to time, whole swathes of ebook listings get deleted or delayed on Amazon – and the others – whether through accident, misunderstanding, over-reaction to some alleged moral panic, or when Amazon wants to force through some new terms and conditions. Behemoth Books has a whole range of other sales outlets, so that takes some of the sting out of the hit. They’re also big enough to generate sufficient bad publicity that whoever’s at fault gets the hint to sort things out pretty sharpish. Back Bedroom Books of Chipping Norton is in a world of trouble and the smaller the publishing operation, the less clout they have, however loudly they’re clamouring for action.

At the moment, if such an oddity crops up, that reader can head to the publisher’s own website and with any luck, they can get a DRM free edition that they can enjoy without these hassles.

Not after 31st December 2014, they won’t be able to.

*For those of you just joining this story – as of 1st January 2015, VAT (essentially a sales tax) on electronic products will be levied at the rate applicable at the customer’s location, rather than the suppliers’ base of operations. So Amazon will have to pay 20% for sales into the UK rather than Luxembourg’s 3%. You can find a whole lot more about this via previous posts and links on this blog. And let’s not forget it’s not just Amazon who’ve been taking (perfectly legal) advantage of the current loophole by funnelling all their business through Luxembourg.

So now calculating a price across EU borders means knowing the applicable rate of tax at the customer’s location. That’s 28 separate jurisdictions. Are you supposed to set a price that’s going to fluctuate at the check-out when someone tells you where they live? That’ll be so unpopular that people obviously won’t. So you have to pitch the price where you guess the plusses and minuses will even out and you won’t take too much of a hit. How are you supposed to know where people live? There’s a list of approved indicators, and you’re supposed to collect three pieces of data, of which two must match. Er, okay. Oh and you’ve got to store that highly sensitive personal data securely for ten years. Okay?

So this is a real headache, and the smaller the scale of your operations, the bigger headache it becomes because the turnover threshold for this is £0.00. Or €0.00. Or $0.00 in whatever sort of dollars you use.

Amazon – and Google Play, and iBooks – have known this is coming for several years now, and have their new systems in place, as anyone publishing via KDP now knows from this week’s email. Publishers who sell ebooks direct from their own websites – and who belong to the trade bodies which have been HMRC’s main route for spreading the word about this – have known it was coming and have paid their software developers to write them compliant new systems accordingly. Okay then, they’re covered.

For anyone else, there’s VATMOSS, the HMRC’s new VAT Mini One Stop Shop, which will do all the sums for you. That is fine if you’re already VAT registered, which means having a turnover of over £81,000 by the way. You’ll have an accountant who’s used to doing VAT returns and you can probably afford to pay him or her to do that bit of extra work.

But the smallest of small publishers? Who don’t dream of reaching VAT registration levels in their wildest imaginings? Who don’t belong to any trade body that could have warned them this horror was on its way? They’re in a world of trouble, because the free/cheap web payment mechanisms they rely on, like PayPal, simply don’t provide the location information they need. Even if they could get it, is anyone going to be happy with their highly sensitive personal data sitting on the hard drive of someone’s laptop on a kitchen table? They can’t opt out of EU sales either; plug-in web payment mechanisms don’t enable that and anyway that falls foul of discrimination legislation.

These small publishers are having to close their direct ebook webstores as of 31st December 2014. Unless they want to risk the chance of lose-your-house-money fines. Yes, really.

I’ve spent the weekend getting a few things about the new EU regulations on e-commerce clarified in my own mind, reading a range of online resources and also various bits of EU regulation and legislation.

Digital products as ebooks, training and self-help manuals or guides, craft patterns, digital art, photograph or music files are now defined as ‘services’ on an equal footing with cloud data storage, online marketplaces, web hosting and online games. Not the process of selling ebooks and music etc. The actual digital file itself is now a ‘service’ even though in most cases that sale will be a simple one-off transaction.

So there’s a fundamental and massive misunderstanding, or ignorance of, how small-scale direct e-commerce works. All the legislation refers to electronic service providers and specifically defines ebook sales as ‘like Amazon Kindle.’ Now, I would certainly agree that signing up for Kindle (or Nook or Google Play), qualifies as buying an electronic service. It means downloading their app software to your device, and buying books as well as paying for the ongoing benefits of cloud storage, the ability to re-download titles, to read those books on other equipment, so on and so forth.

This is wholly different to buying an ebook direct from a writer or a small press. That is a one-off transaction to purchase a digital file – nearly always DRM free these days – with no ongoing relationship expected or implied.

And obviously, the same is true for such small-scale purchases of knitting patterns, music, artwork, photos, how-to-guides, the list goes on and on…

I’ve also been talking to pals with successful campaigning experience and they all say working with an umbrella group is the most effective way to get press notice and to apply legislative pressure. So I though I would see about getting one underway.

I’m aiming to get together as many microbusinesses as I can – the part time, retired, carers, evening and weekend traders for whom small-scale e-commerce has offered a financial lifeline as well as the local businesses for whom selling e-products has offered a new income stream and promotional opportunities alongside their other activities.

Please check out the Digital Microbusiness Action Group if all this affects you. No fees, no obligations, no pack drill – I’m simply looking to get a viable number of folk together so we can speak with a single voice.

I can now refer to ‘we’ after getting ten sign-ups overnight – phew.

Oh, and why am I doing this? Well, I had a fair bit of time between now and Christmas allocated in my diary for preparing the next series of my backlist novels as ebooks. Since VATMOSS looks likely to shut the small e-press who’ve published my ebooks, I figure I may as well spend my time attempting to do something positive.

And now this blog will (hopefully) return to more normal content!

As people continue to seek clarification, it becomes more and more apparent that microbusinesses are going to be wrecked by this.

Cheryl Morgan of Wizard’s Tower Press (who have been publishing my backlist and new shorter fiction as ebooks.

In her follow-up post The VATMOSS Mess Enters Looking Glass Land she follows up with this revelation

Generally, non-resident businesses that must register for VAT in another EU state face a nil registration threshold. A major exception to this rule is e-commerce to consumers, where foreign EU retailers have special EU distance selling VAT thresholds.

I’ll repeat that. Special EU distance selling VAT thresholds, which apply solely to digital transactions. Here they are. And guess what? None of them are anywhere close to zero. All of them would easily allow a micro-business such as Wizard’s Tower to keep trading.

So we really need to press HMRC for solid reasons why they are making such destructive changes to UK VAT legislation when it doesn’t seem as if other EU countries are doing so.

Meantime, the impossibility of compliance is already seeing microbusinesses shutting up shop.

The Writers’ Greenhouse is shutting up shop. Crucial information here on how impossible complying with the associated regulations on storing customer data would be.

change servers and all my data storage: to comply with the data protection rules, everything would have to be on EU servers. My server, which hosts 8 websites and some 20 URLs, and I don’t even know how many associated emails, is based in Canada. Dropbox, which backs up all my stuff, is based in the United States. I don’t even know where my Gmail server is.

Clare Josa explains how using Paypal won’t enable online sellers to obtain the required customer information.

Incidentally, I’ve seen people scoffing at questions about where an ebook is taxed if a UK customer on holiday in France downloads it. Holidays are one thing but what about the extended periods that EU citizens now spend in other member countries? My husband works for the UK subsidiary of a Dutch firm which also has a Romanian subsidiary & it’s not unusual for Dutch employees to spend 6 months in UK, or English employees to spend 6 months in Romania. What’s the position there? How is the seller supposed to collect the two non-contradictory pieces of information to identify the buyer’s location when the credit card comes from a Dutch bank and the IP address and telephone number of the landline delivering the product is in the UK or Romania?

Savvy Mums Business Website article, raising the issue of people being pushed back onto welfare benefits. Bear in mind that 80% of the recently self-employed are women.

Rachel Andrew explains the horrible implications of the EU VAT “Place of Supply” change

You can only register for the MOSS if you are UK VAT Registered.

This means that Ann – our freelancer designer who also sells an ebook – is either going to have to register for VAT in every country she sells to, charge VAT to their residents and pay VAT due OR register in the UK and also register for MOSS.

And if Ann becomes VAT registered, all her prices go up by 20%. That’ll hardly help her business stay competitive, compared to similar traders who abandon digital products and can wait for the £80k threshold before they have to register.

The Government’s own service assessment of the VATMOSS portal “After completing our assessment we have concluded the VAT Mini One Stop Shop service should not be given approval to be a live service on the HMRC portal.” As of 3rd October 2014

HMRC’s own version of the Twitter Q&A.

Oh, they’ve also published an email address for queries. Since I have some very urgent ones over decisions I need to make soon about commissioning artwork and other ebook-related services, I wrote and explained my concerns. That email has bounced, telling me that’s an invalid recipient. Do we think that email address has gone down under a deluge of messages or it was never working in the first place due to some institutional incompetence?

Firstly, apologies to those finding all this stuff about VAT tedious and/or confusing. But it really does matter, and not just to authors trying to put out their own ebooks. Independent digital versions are increasingly the only way for readers to get hold of backlist titles and ebooks without DRM constraints.

Okay, here’s what little useful information I gleaned from yesterday’s HMRC Customer’s Twitter Clinic.

Let’s start with one definitive answer – which will interest the US authors of my acquaintance who sell direct or through co-operatives like Book View Cafe.

A Canadian knitwear designer asked
Question – As a Canadian selling online knit patterns, do I really have to track & pay #VATMOSS on the ~ 40 patterns/yr I sell in UK&EU?
Answer – Yes, if a digital service. Consider non-union MOSS scheme

So the next question obviously becomes – what is a digital service?

According to HMRC – “An e-service is one that is fully automated and involves no or minimal human intervention”.

So anything that’s an electronic product – ebook (fiction, non-fiction), music, training material, computer game, knitting or other craft pattern, the list goes on – that is delivered by any automated payment and download system falls under this legislation.

Okay, so what does ‘minimal human intervention’ mean?

At this point, HMRC’s answers started coming prefaced with ‘It depends’…

Q – Someone donates to my company in return for a digital “perk” (eg: through kickstarter or Patreon ) Do I need VATMOSS?
A – It depends on the nature of the perk.

Q – Are one-to-one web & graphic design services considered a e-service? Will this affect me as a freelancer?
A – Depends on whether the customisation is automated or involves human intervention. If latter, no.

Q – so web designers that design custom websites for clients are free from VATMOSS then?
A – Depends on whether the customisation is automated or involves human intervention. If latter, no.

Further clarification (I use the term loosely) from HMRC followed –“ “Minimal human intervention” is where a person takes some physical action for the service to take place.”

plus

“Emails & attachments are included if generated automatically by system following customer inputting their details and payment.”

But –

Q- If I sell a physical doc to EU buyer but then give them access to a free PDF version of it, do I incur VAT?
A – The new rules don’t apply.

And

Q – If a PDF copy of pattern/ebook is given complimentary with purchase of a physical copy of pattern/ebook is VAT owed on PDF?
A – No, it will not be subject to VAT.

Moreover, according to HMRC –
“Live webinars not e-service. If pdf and follow up recording are included in charge, will be treated same way as webinar…

If there is a separate charge it will depend upon whether the pdf or recording is an electronic service…

Virtual classroom combining live webinars, videos, pdfs would not be an e-service because of amount of human intervention involved.”

So we’re back to wondering what does or does not constitute the required level of human intervention.

Q- Does emailing with an attachment count as ‘human intervention’ when selling through a platform such as ETSY?
A- If they are physically submitting the email and it is not an automated process.

Q – But if the purchase is automated (ie via ETSY) and then I physically send the PDF in an attachment?
A- Payment service irrelevant to determine whether e-service.

Q – To be clear, regardless of how you’re paid, if you hand send out the download emails, it’s not an e-service?
A – That’s correct.

Similarly –

Q- Does that mean if I go back to the dark ages and manually send a download by file transfer it is exempt?
A -Manual downloads will be exempt.

Q – So even if I’m sending the exact same file to all customers as long as I do that manually myself I’m OK?
A – Yes, as long as email not automatically generated and you manually send it.

However –

Q- What about videos? If a customer purchases to get access to private videos (hosted on say YouTube or Vimeo)?
A – Sending the password manually by e mail does not constitute an electronic service so the new rules don’t apply…
However, if the service they are logging into is an e-service then it would be affected by the new rules.

Also –

Q – If sell a product & the user is redirected to a receipt page and they MANUALLY DOWNLOAD it, that’s human intervention, yes?
A – It is the provider’s manual intervention not the customer’s that is important.

So you can only avoid all this mess as a seller only by manually hand processing all orders and emailing files to customers.

Unlike for instance, Amazon who will continue to offer instant one-click payment and downloads. Right, so that’s going to make a customer’s choices pretty easy, eh?

Which brings me to the question of Amazon and other platforms like Etsy etc.

Q – How are devs selling apps on AppStore / GooglePlay into EU affected? Do the stores handle VATMOSS, or is it up to the dev?
A – Yes, App stores and marketplace will be responsible for VAT on dig services sold through their platforms.

Q- If u sell digi products via 3rd party platform but host selling buttons on ur own site do you have to register for VAT?
A- If providing a link to a third-party platform, no. If you sell through your own site, you would have to register.

Q – Can you provide approved list of 3rd party intermediaries that we can use instead of VAT reg?
A – Any sales platform is responsible if they initiate delivery or authorise payment process or set T&Cs.

Q – what if your third party platform disputes liability? Who is responsible in the meantime?
A – The third party platform is responsible

Q – what defines a third party platform and marketplace and what’s the difference between them?
A – A simple definition is that if a marketplace is responsible for authorising/allowing the download it is responsible.

Seems clear enough? Until people started getting into specifics

Q – Does this mean that the patterns I sell on @beCraftsy , @ravelry , and @EtsyUK are their responsibility for VAT?…
If I decide to sell via those platforms how can I be sure I am complying with law by leaving VAT to them?

Q – I believe you’re saying @beCraftsy @EtsyUK, etc are responsible, yet they say they’re NOT???

Q – I assumed that Paypal was more a payment processor than a marketplace.

Q – If ur PayPal account is linked to 3rd party, but the 3rd party provides order & delivery service, who pays VAT?

Q – What if one system initiates delivery (@fetchapp) and another authorises payment (@PayPal)? Which is responsible?

Q – But they authorize payments. I use Ravelry’s website to list patterns for sale, but PayPal handles the $.
Q- Are @gumroad included here? They said they are not but payment goes through them.

If there have been any clear answers to any of these questions, I have yet to see them.

And this is before we get into the considerable confusion of how traders with minimal turnover go about voluntarily registering for VAT in order to comply with VATMOSS. There are already reports of those who’ve tried being turned away as ineligible.

Another good question is how the advice to separate UK and EU trading into two separate companies despite both being part of the same overall trading business squares with other HMRC warnings that doing precisely this will be considered attempted tax evasion.

Reports are now coming in of small traders and companies simply abandoning e-commerce because of the complications and uncertainty, and also, the fact that getting it wrong will leave people liable to potentially unlimited fines.

At the moment, all my own e-publishing projects planned for 2015 are on hold. That’s the ebook editions of the Aldabreshin Compass series, The Ties That Bind novella and a related collection of short stories, and also a new urban fantasy novel. Because preparing those would require up-front investment of around £1500 from me for various art, map, editorial and other technical services.

Because I cannot get anything remotely resembling a clear answer on whether or not small presses are still/also liable for complying with these new EU VAT regulations as being part of a supply chain between the author and Amazon.

Until the small press I work with knows for certain what their liabilities will be, they cannot assess how/if to stay in business.

Clearly, if I was only publishing via Amazon, I’d be fine. But I do not wish to publish my ebooks with Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing as their terms and conditions are non-neogotiable and subject to change by them, at any time, without notice.

Publishing with a small press means I can negotiate a mutually satisfactory contract and also that small press can make my ebooks available via a range of outlets and in both .epub and .mobi formats rather than exclusively through Amazon.

So that’s where we’re at.

Is it too early for gin?

*If you’re checking back for updates and further links, I’m adding them to the end of this post so please scroll down*

Ah, the law of unintended consequences. You really would have thought legislators would know about that one. Apparently not. New VAT legislation to stop the likes of Amazon sneaking round their tax liabilities has a massive flaw. The turnover threshold is set at £0 which means small online retailers of ebooks and other digital products will have to compile VAT returns including details of the countries where each and every customer is based.

There’s more information at Cheryl Morgan’s website since unsurprisingly, this will make life for Wizard’s Tower Press untenable. Which will make earning any sort of income significantly harder for me and all of her other authors.

Just to give you some idea of how bad this is, Cheryl says –

The implications for any small company selling digital products are so horrendous that the Head of Tax at the Institute of Chartered Accountants (England & Wales) has apparently suggested that small businesses stop selling in Europe to avoid all of this mess. Except, how can you? The digital world is global by nature. The better-written platforms, such as Amazon, will at least allow you to block sales via their EU-based sites. However, there’s nothing to stop someone in, say, Finland, buying one of my books via Amazon US, or Amazon UK. If they did, I may be legally obliged to account for that, and Amazon’s systems don’t give me enough information to do that.

There is an online petition asking Vince Cable to maintain the existing VAT threshold, which will mean big companies who can afford the staff and systems to do the admin will pay a fair rate of tax while small business will still be able to trade and to grow without this dire limitation on how they can trade online.

There’s also a Twitter campaign today 25th November using the hashtags #VATMESS and #VATMOSS. If this concerns you, please help get this issue trending, to alert the government to the scale of the problem they’re about to create.

26th November – Edited to add links to some good articles I came across during yesterday’s Twitter campaign

How VATMOSS is the end of small enterprise in Britain – and how we can change it from Heather Burns, web design & ecommerce law expert.

A retired tax inspector’s verdict “badly thought out, badly explained, and badly handled”. from Wendy Bradley.

What is this VATMOSS mess? from the Satago Blog.

New EU VAT regulations could threaten micro-businesses from The Guardian.

Other things that came up as a result of Twitter exchanges –

No one, not even HMRC, has any idea how this will apply to crowdfunding such as Kickstarter.

Apparently HMRC talked to a ‘small business consultative group’ about all this to satisfy consultation requirements. No one seems to have any details about who was part of that group though.

This notion of sufficient consultation completely misses the point that most small and especially online businesses won’t actually belong to any professional or other organisations who might be expected to represent the reality of their trading models.

And as Cheryl Morgan has pointed out, the HMRC definition of ‘small business’ means an enterprise capable of providing a living for one or more people. This excludes vast numbers of ‘micro-businesses’ which are run from home, predominately online, as sidelines or to fund hobbies. For instance, a lot of people selling their knitting and embroidery patterns reckon they will be shut down by this.

Apparently HMRC reckoned 34,000 businesses would be affected. Estimates in the newspapers and elsewhere are around 350,000.

Those with experience of HMRC data handling and administration cannot believe they will be able to handle the new workload. Even at the lower estimate.

27th November

Knitwear designer Ysolda Teague attended a seminar about this yesterday, with a representative from HMRC present to answer questions. She reports back in her blogpost here, and also has further useful information. (If you’re a knitter, check out her patterns while you’re at her website!)

There is a Twitter Clinic scheduled by HMRC between 3:30 and 5pm today 27th November. (So slap in the middle of the school run for mums working from home and useless for anyone with a full time job who runs a digital side-business in the evenings and at weekends.) Direct your questions to @HMRCcustomers.

28th November

I’ve summarized the gleanings from that Twitter clinic in the post following this one.

Do also read the ‘Modest Proposal’ blogpost by a retired tax inspector, Wendy Bradley linked in the pingback in comments below.

It’s not only the fantasy end of the speculative fiction genre that owes an awful lot to history. So does science fiction – something recognised by the Science Fiction Foundation when they put together their 2013 conference “Swords, Sorcery, Sandals and Space: The Fantastika and the Classical World”. The most recent issue of the SFF journal ‘Foundation’ includes a selection of papers from the event. As you can imagine, being a Classics graduate myself, these are of considerable interest to me.

What can looking backwards contribute to our understanding and enjoyment of the literature of the future and of imagined, secondary worlds? Granted, all contemporary writing ultimately has its roots in the Classics but surely the arrow of time should be pointing us in the other direction, to see where creative developments will take us? Not so. As far as I am concerned, a Janus-headed approach offers far more benefits.

Authors of prose fiction, graphic novels and those writing for the screen, large and small, continue to draw on the Classical myths and motifs that can so often provide points of contact and a common frame of reference for readers and viewers widely separated by geography, educational systems and life experience. This alone is argument enough for the continued teaching of Classical literature in our schools and not merely the works of the Ancient Greeks and Romans. Where readers (of all faiths and none) can pick up an author’s subtle references and allusions, thanks to a working knowledge of writing from the Bible to the Epic of Gilgamesh, this significantly enhances their depth of understanding and thus their enjoyment.

Then there are two ways of looking the use of such myths and allusions. Firstly we can see how a writer adopts and adapts Classical motifs and find insights into their creative process and its evolution throughout an individual career. We can also trace their contribution to the development of archetypes such as the hero and the villain, both within SF and Fantasy and in wider literature.

Secondly we can analyse a writer’s choice and use of Classical elements in the light of their own life and times. Academic or amateur, every historian learns how interpretation of sources, from potsherds to plays, says at least as much about the onlooker’s where and when as it does about the material in hand. For instance, for more than a century, authors have used the rise and fall of the Roman Empire to explore problematic aspects of cultural and political hegemony from the heyday of British Imperialism to the Cold War and beyond. Of course, Science Fiction and Fantasy have always done this; using somewhere far, far away and long ago or far ahead, to stand outside the world we live in and thus gain a clearer perspective.

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. That much is true. However studying the Classics and Speculative Fiction alike shows us time and again, that however different externals like hemlines and hairdos might be, humanity’s concerns remain constant and eternal. Love of family. Longing for security. Fear of the Other and of the Unknown. Tensions as to when the needs of the many must outweigh the needs of the few.

In the midst of our current uncertainties, with so many selfishly seeking to exploit political, cultural and religious differences for short-term gain, we can all benefit from the seeing how much more unites us than divides us, through the storyteller’s eye.

Actually, the first – and really irritating – bit of my day wasn’t even in Bristol. It was in the gridlocked traffic around Swindon where I got thoroughly stuck, thanks to an accident and road closure just ahead and at a point on the route where I had no hope of escape. So I never did get there in time to chat on Ujima Radio – which just goes to show the risks of arranging single-guest events. I’m always an advocate of having at least two authors along, in case of unforeseen gremlins. And thank goodness for mobile phones – since texting from in a stationary car with the engine turned off and handbrake on doesn’t contravene the law.

Happily Cheryl Morgan and Lucienne Boyce were at Ujima to have what sounds like a fascinating conversation about what history is versus what people think it might be, touching on issues like the persistent and false belief that multi-cultural communities are a recent development in England. The briefest glance at a city like Bristol’s history shows that for the tosh that it is.

Anyway, once I got out of the traffic jam, the day improved enormously. I got to Bristol without further incident, met Cheryl for lunch and we discussed life, the universe and future plans for my writing with Wizards Tower Press, of which more news as various projects develop. Then we went to the Bristol Museum and Gallery. I love visiting local museums, especially to look at their paintings and not just for any big names like Pissarro or whoever they might have on hand. It’s the local artists I like to find and in this case, I was very interested to discover the work of Rolinda Sharples (1793-1838). She was a female artist specializing in portraits along with some larger pieces, who was good enough to be exhibited at the Royal Academy. The whole family were successful and commercial artists including her mother (unlike a good many of those big names) living at various times in England and New York. Tell me again how women didn’t get to do anything noteworthy in days of yore. And as anyone will know who’s heard me talk about using visual references, work like Rolinda’s is a source of invaluable historical detail and unexpected inspiration.

Then we headed to Foyles in Cabot Circus, and that’s a lovely bookshop with great staff, well worth checking out if you’re in the area. It was a pleasure to meet Helen Hollick and Jack Wolf, along with Lucienne and we sat down with Cheryl to discuss the relationships between history and fantasy. We touched on what does or does not constitute ‘accuracy’, and the challenges of making the past accessible without obscuring the very real differences in how people thought and felt – and those are important, especially if we’re hoping our writing will make readers think (as well as enjoying an engaging, exciting read), whether it’s fantasy or history or as was apparent for us all, somewhere between. We talked about the challenges of the correct versus the appropriate language in our writing, in using real people and real events – and not for the first time, it was soon apparent that formal, academic education is in no sense required for an author to do solid research to underpin their work. All that’s needed is the curiosity and the common sense to spot what assumptions or agenda might lie behind a source.

We had a good audience, in terms of numbers and most importantly, in terms of people keen to listen and think and ask questions and discuss. Oh and a handful of local steampunk fans turned up in splendid costumes which added a further dimension to chatting about the relationship of history and the modern day. As with all good events, we could have gone on talking as a panel and then informally afterwards for hours. As it was, we writers headed out for a meal before we went our separate ways, and yes, the conversation did continue round the table in many, varied and fascinating directions.

I had an entirely uneventful trip home, so a day that started mired in frustration got better and better and now I have three new-to-me authors to add to my Must Read list.

It’s a bit odd to see all the Centenary of the Great War commemoration this year when I can remember talking to men and women who lived through it. Granted I was a very little girl when my Great Uncle Harold explained he’d been in the Royal Flying Corps, in the skies above the Western Front.

I’m pretty sure I was five, which makes sense because the twenty-fifth anniversary of D-Day in 1970 would most likely have prompted me to ask what he did in ‘the war’ as we walked to the paper shop one sunny summer morning, when we were visiting my grandma’s elder sisters in Rustington on Sea. So Great Uncle Harold explained he’d been too old for the war when Grandpa had been in the RAF but he’d been in the war before that in the RFC. No, he hadn’t been a pilot. He’d been a bomber, in those open-cockpit bi-planes, which meant sitting in the back seat, setting the fuses and literally dropping bombs by hand over the side. I remember him talking about seeing the trenches – on both sides – so far below, with the men scurrying like ants and all looking exactly the same. I vividly remember him pausing, looking away into the middle distance and saying with heartfelt passion, ‘Poor devils.’ Then and now I don’t believe he was making any distinction between English and German forces.

My grandma and grandpa were seven years old when the Great War broke out, so they only remembered it as children. My grandpa recalled seeing zeppelins going over Felixstowe where he lived, heading for bombing raids on London. My grandma remembered her eldest brother, Albert, coming home from the trenches where he served from 1914 to 1918. Her mother saw him at the front gate and ran to hug him, only for him to say, ‘Don’t touch me, Mother, I’m crawling with lice.’ So the gardener had to set up a bath in the greenhouse where Albert could strip off and scrub himself down with carbolic soap. Grandma was naturally sent well away. Equally naturally she crept down the garden later, so see what she could see. Albert’s uniform was burning on a bonfire and she couldn’t even see the water in the bath for the layer of vermin covering it.

That’s all she learned about life on the Western Front because Albert never spoke of his experiences to anyone in his family. He gradually lost contact with them, especially after he became involved in the Spiritualist Church. Since then I’ve learned how many people turned to mediums through the 1920s, hoping to make contact with those who had died in the war. It’s impossible to know what Albert experienced but we can guess at some lifelong trauma. He died before I was born, not least from the lingering effects of being gassed.

We know of at least one traumatic experience which my stepfather’s father, Grandpa Joe, suffered in World War Two, but only because sorting through his effects after his death turned up the Distinguished Flying Medal and its accompanying citation. He would tell a few war stories, like borrowing an American jeep in Paris after the Liberation and driving it through the Arc de Triomphe. But he never told anyone, not even his wife, about the day when the Lancaster bomber where he was a radio operator, took such heavy fire that everybody was killed apart from him and one of the gunners. Between them those two young men flew the plane full of their dead comrades back to England and landed it safely. Whatever he thought of being called a hero, he took that to his grave.

Someone else who went all through the Great War in the trenches was Mr Brown who lived a few doors up from my grandparents. He never spoke of those four years either, according to my grandfather who was his friend. Not that I ever spoke to Mr Brown beyond saying hello if our paths crossed when I was walking the dog. He would smile and tip his hat to me and say good morning or good afternoon. He always wore a hat because he was Jewish; I knew that long before I had any clear idea what being Jewish meant. Because grandparents can’t tell war stories to a child like me without being asked ‘but why?’

Well, I never did understand who Kaiser Bill was or what he’d wanted until much later on, but the Nazis were more straightforward. There had been a second war because the Nazis wanted to invade and kill all the people they didn’t like. People like Mr and Mrs Brown. Why didn’t the Nazis like them? Because they’re Jewish. What’s Jewish? Apparently that meant only reading Old Testament stories from the Bible, going to somewhere called a synagogue instead of a church on Saturday instead of Sunday and if you were Mr Brown, always wearing a hat. Which did no harm to anyone and was no one’s business but their own. So that was clear enough. The Nazis had to be stopped from killing Mr Brown just because he was Jewish!

The Nazis, not the Germans. That was a distinction I was very clear on, from as early as I can remember, thanks to stories like how Mr Marsden won his medal. He was my grandparents’ next door neighbour and even as a small child, I remember him as a little man, short and slightly built, among the other grown-ups. Presumably this was why he was a clerk in the Pay Corps rather than a front line fighter in World War Two. That didn’t stop him being sent to Normandy in the week after D-Day. I realised the army’s inexorable logic as I grew older; someone had to update the records of all the dead who wouldn’t need their next pay packet.

Somehow or other, Mr Marsden got separated from his unit and ended up wandering round Normandy on his own as the shadows lengthened. He turned a corner in a country lane and came face to face with two young Germans about his own age, none of them over twenty. They all looked at each other. No one reached for a gun. Who knows who said hello first but he spoke a bit of German and they spoke some English. That was enough to establish that no one wanted to kill anyone. Since it was getting dark, they found a dry ditch where they could spend the night without getting shot by soldiers from either side. He had some chocolate and they had some bread, so they shared that all between them and showed each other family photographs and talked about their lives.

At some point they realised they’d better have a plan for the morning, so no one got shot, either as an enemy soldier or for fraternisation. So they decided their story would be the heroic capture of a prisoner or prisoners, depending which side they met first. Meantime, they exchanged names and addresses, agreeing to write to each other whenever the war finally ended, if they got home safe. Dawn came and off they went to find the Second World War. The first soldiers they encountered were an American unit and so the German lads were safely taken prisoner and Mr Marsden ended up getting a medal for capturing two enemy soldiers single handed. He found that very amusing but the most important thing to him was exchanging letters after the war and knowing those two young men got back to their families, just the same as him.

So this is why I wear a poppy and pause to mark Remembrance Day, for the sake of ordinary young men who found themselves in extraordinary and often appalling situations, which marked them, one way or another, for the rest of their lives. For the sake of their stories, retold in hopes that young men like my own sons, and everyone else’s children, won’t ever see such history repeated.

This is my considered opinion, formed over several years of watching her(?) antics under a variety of false internet personae, of which Benjanun Sriduangkaew is merely the most recent and, I firmly believe, as calculatedly fake as the rest.

I read the Requires Hate blog from time to time, over a relatively short period some years ago and didn’t see a single post of merit. Nothing that qualified remotely as valid criticism. I saw deliberate and targeted spite, often very carefully chosen to hit the latest SFF ‘hot button’ issues – along with a puerile glee in obscenity and deliberate offensiveness. I didn’t see anything of the ‘satire’, ‘performance anger’, ‘justified rage’ and similar excuses which her(?) apologists made to try and excuse her(?) excesses.

Every so often, she(?) would butt into a Twitter conversation I would be having or following with further viciousness and derailing abuse. I went from simply not following that RequiresHate account to actively blocking it. I ended up blocking a few other people who persisted in retweeting her malice.

I had my own run in on LiveJournal with one of her(?) many other fake personae, where she(?) came crashing into a discussion about the Celtic experience of oppression and attacked me with an argument that basically ran – White people are racist. You are white. Therefore I have proved beyond all argument that you are a racist – and will now proceed to hurl capslocked abuse at you and anyone who tries to support you.

At the time I expressed my opinion in various places that Winterfox/Requires Hate/Whoever the hell this vicious troll might be was a manipulative bully – and found that won me further accusations of racism, bullying, arrogance based on white privilege from her(?) enablers and hangers-on.

I decided to ignore all of them from then on.

Others have not been so fortunate.

Laura J Mixon has done sterling work gathering evidence on the duration, breadth and persistence of the campaigns of abuse.

Here is Rochita Ruiz’s latest post on the subject

The campaign against Athena Andreadis

There are more posts emerging as I write this one. I’m sure googling will soon find them for you.

So all this is why it is my considered opinion that Requires Hate, aka Benjanun Sriduangkaew, is a multiple, serial & proven bully, liar & manipulator. I do not believe a single, solitary word of the so-called apologies posted a few weeks ago when these two names were first publicly linked.

I don’t believe a single thing we have been told about ‘Bee’ as she likes to call herself, not least because the admission that she is/was Requires Hate makes so many of Benjanun’s statements to this point quite simply and demonstrably lies.

I am not interested in any arguments trying to excuse or defend her(?). I am not interested in reading any of her(?) work or any arguments that we should somehow acknowledge the supposed merits in her(?) writing, never mind what her(?) personal failings might be.

There is more than enough good, insightful, diverse SF and fantasy out there to be read which is written by people who are provably not multiple, serial & proven bullies, liars & manipulators hiding behind fake names.

Why am I saying this? Because one thing that has become very apparent, not least thanks to Requires Hate/Winterfox/Whoever’s assiduous habit of deleting offensive internet activity and locking down posts, blogs and twitter accounts, that a great many of her(?) victims have felt isolated, disbelieved and friendless.

Not least as so many folk within SFF have ducked the issue of tackling all this unpleasantness… not for the first time…

It’s in this situation that we should remember Dr. Martin Luther King’s words “In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

I choose not to be silent. Requires Hate, aka Benjanun Sriduangkaew, is a multiple, serial & proven bully, liar & manipulator. Those who’ve been targets of her malice should consider me a friend and ally.