I am so honoured that author and poet Christine Miller invited me, together with a hand picked group of British authors, to take part in this great initiative.
It’s ‘A Very British Blog Tour’ which visits and supports the websites of some authors who are dedicated to turning out some of the finest books available in Britain today.
Each author named at the bottom of the page has asked been asked the same questions, but the answers will obviously all be different. You simply click on the author’s name below to see how they have answered the same question.
By the way, we British have certain conventions, traditions and procedures that are expected. There is a dress code in the reading of this British blog and you are expected to comply with it. For example…
Now then, let us proceed in an orderly fashion. As you know, we are all very boring and staid in Britain, aren’t we?
Well, there’s a myth about the British and your starter for ten is – stuffy, class conscious, boring, staid! But is this still relevant in today’s world? Let’s find out from our wonderful writers what they feel about it.
So, without further ado, here are the questions and answers from:
THE VERY BRITISH WRITER: Tom Evans
Q. Where were you born and where do you live at the moment?
A. I was born in Moss Side in Manchester when it resembled the opening titles of Coronation Street. I now live in the Surrey Hills with my life partner and two dogs who take me for a walk whenever they detect I am need of inspiration.
Q. Have you always lived and worked in Britain or are you based elsewhere at the moment?
A. Apart from loads of business travel during my early career in broadcasting, I’ve always been here.
Q. Which is your favourite part of Britain?
A. The south escarpments of the North Downs of Surrey looking towards the South Downs. This is handy as they are a mile or so from my house.
Q. Have you ‘highlighted’ or ‘showcased’ any particular part of Britain in your books? For example, a town or city; a county, a monument or some well-known place or event?
A. As most of my books are non-fiction, geography of anything but the mind doesn’t feature. My first ever book of poetry, 100 Years of Ermintrude, however did include these two stanzas:
“Brian I’ve decided has got to go I’ll miss his flat & friends in Pimlico”
“I never thought I’d ever live in Tring A mother of two, now there’s a thing”
p.s. I’ve never lived in either place myself, been a mother of two or had a boyfriend called Brian!
Q. There is an illusion – or myth if you wish – about British people that I would like you to discuss. Many see the ‘Brits’ as ‘stiff upper lip’. Is that correct?
A. I see British people mostly as courageous innovators who are brilliant in both the arts and sciences but who also possess a keen sense of humour and healthy level of self-depreciation. In my opinion, any lack of flexibility in the upper lip is a stereotype which is best confined to history books and films about the various wars.
Q. Do any of the characters in your books carry the ‘stiff upper lip’? Or are they all ‘British Bulldog’ and unique in their own way?
A. Ermintrude was (or is) indomitable.
Q. Tell us about one of your recent books?
A. I wrote and published my latest book, This We Know, in less than three weeks. I didn’t plan to write it, it just happened. It is a meme exploring what we know, what we don’t know and what world we could know. I’m in discussions about making it into a documentary and would love to interview people about the world they would like to know.
Q. What are you currently working on?
A. I have started writing the third in a trilogy which takes esoteric and arcane knowledge and makes it exoteric and contempory. The first two books explored the meanings behind the Major and Minor Arcana of the Tarot. This book with the working title of Leaving Cubeland will explore and explain two glyphs, The Tree of Life and the Cube of Space.
Q. How do you spend your leisure time?
A. As I love the ’work’ I do, I don’t switch between one mode and another. Neither do I ’spend my time’ as such – if anything I bend, shape and morph it into intriguing shapes. I just love riding at 66,000 miles an hour on Spaceship Earth.
Q. Do you write for a local audience or a global audience?
A. Definitely global and any passing aliens who tune in when they are flying past.
The Next Big Thing is a meme initiated by other authors which encourages typically self-effacing writers, like me, to BIG UP their work and share why we wrote it.
If you are an author and want to join in, all you have to do is write a blog with this title answering the questions that I have below. Then tag other authors, like me, who are joining in with the programme.
My tags below …
1) What is the working title of your current/next book? My current book is entitled This We Know. My next book is completes a trilogy taking the esoteric and making it exoteric. The working title is Leaving Cubeland.
2) Where did the idea come from?
The idea for the current book came from watching my better half snoozing on the sofa and wondering how many other people on the planet were asleep right at that time. This then led me to ponder how many people who were actually awake were in some kind of waking sleep.
3) What genre does your book fall under?
Philosophy and futurology.
4) What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?
It’s non-fiction (apart from the Postscript 2112), so I would like the documentary version of this book to be narrated by the Lord of the QI Elves himself, the supremely knowledgeable Stephen Fry. It would be an exploration of our amazing knowledge and our amazing lack of knowledge in some fundamental areas. It would also ask people from all walks of life what sort of world they would like to live in.
5) What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
There is an infinity of things that we don’t know compared to what we think we know.
6) Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
I started writing the book on the 3rd September 2012 and had the printed books in my hands on the 21st September. It was available worldwide for ereaders on the 22nd September. Self publishing was the only option. Note I prefer the term indie publishing though. This is one of the beneficial byproducts of being able to Bend Time.
7) How long did it take you to write the first draft?
Less than two weeks. Note I teach the different-ability to tap into our future self to get the words we have yet to write. For this reason, the first draft was also pretty much the final draft.
8) What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
Unashamedly I’d compare it with some of Seth Godin’s disruptive thinking and one reviewer compared the writing style to that of Richard Bach.
9) Who or what inspired you to write this book?
A medium sent me a poem that had been given to her specifically for me. It’s called the Journey of the Secret Man. Two days after I received it, the book just flooded in.
10) What else about the book might pique the reader’s interest?
This short video was specifically put together to pique interest.
Other Next Big Things
Here’s some of the other author’s answers to the same questions …
… and when you are done, make that list and start Bending Time – it comes with a full 30 day refund guarantee so you have nothing to lose but spending a little time to create loads more!!
We give Old Father Time a bit of a hard time. We blame him constantly.
“There are not enough hours in the day.”
“Where did the time go?”
“I would write that book if only I had the time.”
“Time just gets away from me.”
This really unfair on him. He gives us continuity. He allows us to have memories of the past and to dream about the future. He stops everything from happening all at once, which would be ever so confusing for us.
It is humankind, not him, who have enslaved themselves to time. If you wear a watch, you are entrapping yourself ‘in time’. Watch that clock and again, you bond yourself to time. Even our calendar imprisons us in unnatural time. Months of varying lengths are a man-made construct. September, October, November and December should, by rights, be the seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth months of the year. We have the egos of Julius (July) and Augustus (August) Caesar to thank for that anomaly.
Incidentally, we have a perfectly good clock which orbits the Earth 13 times very year with the cosmic precision. When you live your life by 13 Moon Time, I can testify personally you stop pushing water uphill.
Time is not external and imposed upon us. It is generated by our consciousness. If we want to change our interaction with it, all we have to do is change how and what we think. For example, if you fret over past events or worry about the future, you have taken your focus away from what you are working on right now. You will ‘lose’ and waste time.
Old Father Time has become a bit of a punch bag who never complains. He just keeps marching along silently, probably smiling at our naivety at the way we have allowed ourselves to be entrapped by time.
Just imagine though if we could expand time such that we could get everything we wanted done and more. We would have no excuses and nobody to blame. All of a sudden we would be completely accountable for our actions and deeds. This would have massive implications. Time wasters would have nowhere to hide and those that are productive would get even more done.
In just 35 short years, Mozart composed over 600 works, many praised as masterpieces. Bearing in mind he started around the age of 5, that’s 30 or so compositions a year. Now he had no Internet, TV or computer games to consume his time, but that is pretty amazing output by any standards.
It’s said, if you want something done, give it to a busy person. Why this works is that busy people, like Mozart are not frittering time away on other things, they are focussed on getting things done.
For many people, having an external clock superimposed upon them is the most brilliant excuse. The reality is this however. We can all choose to to run our consciousness at a different rate and to get more done in less time. When we do this in a team or group, time dilation effects multiply.
If you sit in your left brain, with your ‘inner devil’ focussed on detail, you get nothing done. When you live a right brained existence with your head in the clouds, nothing gets done either. However, when both brain hemispheres work in harmony, our efficiency increases by 400% or so.
What’s even more amazing about achieving such efficiency gains is that the techniques required are largely free. They involve breathing and learning to get in the zone by entering the meditative state with our eyes open. These techniques also have health benefits by reducing stress and even lowering blood pressure. It’s thought that every minute spent in the meditative state adds at least a minute to our life spans.
So just imagine what you might do and what you might achieve if you no longer had the excuse that there was not enough time. There’s no time like the present to find out.
Living Timefully is a revolutionary time management programme that shows you how to change your experience of time by changing the way you think. Start Living Timefully today
If you run a business where you charge by the hour, there is a fundamental limit to your annual turnover based on your hourly rate.
Let’s say you could work for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week and 48 weeks a year and you charge £50 an hour. If you were lucky enough to have 100% client bookings, you could earn £96,000 a year. This is not a bad level of income but you might burn out in the process.
This also leaves no time for client acquisition, any admin or even a tea break! Those that are lucky enough to have a full client diary end doing their admin and marketing in the evenings and weekends and end up becoming their own employee.
Now there are some conventional ways out of this quagmire:
You can outsource your admin
You can of course put your hourly rate up and do less hours for the same turnover
You can take on other consultants, train them in your methods and take a percentage of their earnings
You can even write a book, or design an eproduct or three, and make money while you sleep
There is though a radical and revolutionary way to get more done in less time and, as a result, become more profitable. This method is initially useful where you are billing for work commissioned by the client and not in face to face meetings. When you get confident in the techniques, I will explain how you can pull this trick off in front of a client too!
It’s a common misconception that time is fixed. If you’ve ever been in a waiting room with nothing to read, minutes can stretch into seeming hours. Conversely busy weekends can fly by and Monday come around all too soon.
What and how we think directly affects the perceived passage of time. Spend time fretting about the past or worrying about the future and you will at least half your efficiency and output right now.
On the other hand, when you ’get in the zone’ however, you can double, triple or quadruple your output. So, rather than increasing your hourly rate, you can keep it the same but more of the same work in less time. The client will be happy too, not least as the quality of the work we do when we are focussed increases several-fold.
The secrets of how to pull off this magical feat are revealed in Living Timefully, a revolutionary time management programme. This self study course turns time management on its head. Note that it’s not yet another methodology on how to better prioritise and how to manage interruptions. It shows you how you can change the speed of your thoughts so you can get more done in less time.
The proof of how it works is in tasting the pudding but just imagine if it’s true, how could you use possibly use this in face to face interactions?
When you learn the simple mindfulness techniques, something amazing happens when you switch your internal time clock, the ’clocks’ of people around you also switch to match yours. So, for example, if you have a non-chargeable sales or project scoping meeting, you can reach consensus in half the time. This way you can get back to billing work more quickly.
When you are in a chargeable session with a client they get more from the session and feel they get great value from you. They value their time too so your seeming efficiency, focus and clarity gives you an edge over your competitors. You might even consider putting your rates up when the inevitable testimonials come flying in.
So what are you waiting for? As for planting a tree, the best time to start creating more time is yesterday. The second best time is today!
I am so honoured that author and poet Christine Miller invited me, together with a hand picked group of British authors, to take part in this great initiative.
Q. Where were you born and where do you live at the moment?
A. I wrote and published my latest book, This We Know, in less than three weeks. I didn’t plan to write it, it just happened. It is a meme exploring what we know, what we don’t know and what world we could know. I’m in discussions about making it into a documentary and would love to interview people about the world they would like to know.
