charles barrow's writing

I've been pirated. I've had one of my books - The Stolen Days of John Mann - stolen (oh the irony). A website that calls itself an on-line library, has been recruiting 'editors' whose task it is to upload ebooks that will then be available to download from the site. The 'library' doesn't seem to much care where their 'editors' are sourcing their uploads from. Obviously self-published authors are an easy target for this kind of scam because we have no big publishing house behind us to threaten legal action if the uploads aren't removed. Users subscribe to the site and pay a membership fee for access to all the 'free' content. So the website's creators are receiving payment for content that they don't own, and the authors and creators of said content get nothing, no royalties at all.  I found out about this this morning from @BookSpotlight on Twitter. They tweeted about it as several authors had contacted them to highlight what was ...

Okay so the last couple of weeks have been tough ones for me - mental health wise. I was motoring along quite well, beforehand, and then I hit a brick wall. It's really not uncommon that this is the way it happens, which I suppose makes it a pattern for me. There was no particular big event, or inciting incident if you will, that tipped me over into depression, just a drip, drip of small things that added to the pool of worries and anxieties (if they aren't the same thing), and suddenly I can't get off the sofa. I'm single, so it's easy not to have to get up, get dressed, leave the flat. There is no-one to chivvy me along. I don't work at the moment so I have nowhere to get to by 9am, and no one to call me for missing my shift. And I recently moved to a town where almost no one knows me, just a couple of folk I say hello to in the communal hallways of the building where I live. So it's really easy for me to just not participate in the day. I'm in a kind ...