Pattaya Beach Road: photo by Fernanda Araujo on Pexels.com
Pattaya’s Most Famous Street?
Pattaya Beach Road is one of the most famous streets in Thailand. It is located on the eastern side of Pattaya Bay and The Gulf of Thailand.
Pattaya Beach Road
ป้ายบนพัทยาคมวินสตีเฟนต์ (Pattaya Beach Road in Thai) is a street in Pattaya, Chonburi Province, Thailand. The street runs along the shoreline of Pattaya Bay. It is famous for its many bars, restaurants, nightclubs, and hotels. In fact, the road has been dubbed “Pattaya’s most famous street” since it was built in the 1970s. However, Walking Street might fairly lay claim to that title too. In recent years, the area has become more popular with tourists than locals. Many people visit the area because of its golden sand and peaceful sea views, although also for its nightlife, shopping, and entertainment options.
However, some residents complain about noise pollution, litter, and crime.
Pattaya’s Strip
The road has many nicknames, depending on where the visitor has come from. It has been known as “Pattaya’s Main Street” since it was first built. It is also called “First Road”, “The Strip”, “The Avenue”, and “The Boulevard”. Nevertheless, most people refer to it as “Pattaya Beach Road” or simply “Beach Road”. The road runs along the beach front for about 3.5 km from near The Dolphin Roundabout in the north to Walking Street in the south. This is the place where tourists come to enjoy the nightlife and shopping. There are plenty of bars, restaurants, clubs, and shops along the road. This is the area to investigate if you are looking for a hotel near a beach in Pattaya.
Why Is This Street So Popular?
Many people visit Pattaya because of its beautiful beaches. However, there are also other reasons why Beach Road is so popular. One reason is that it has a lot of entertainment options. While the area is ‘perfectly’ safe during daylight hours, the actual beach, and even the beach-side pavement is a no-go area at night. It has a reputation for male prostitution after dark and many men have experienced problems there.
Behind The Smile on Pattaya Beach Road
Behind The Smile volume 1
The Welsh author Owen Jones has written a very popular seven-part series called ‘Behind The Smile – The Story of Lek, A Bar Girl in Pattaya’, which features a bar just off Pattaya Beach Road and the girls who work in it. Many visitors praise the story for being true to life, and several Pattaya bar girls have thanked the author for portraying them honestly.
Click the link below to find out more about the series.
Welsh author, Owen Jones, was born in Barry, Wales in August 1954 to an industrious, working-class family. He had four brother, three of which remain alive on Earth. To distinguish him from other Welsh authors with the same name alive or deceased, his middle name is Ceri (Keri).
Early Life of Owen Jones.
Welsh author Owen Jones went to Colcot Primary School, High Street Junior School, and then Barry Comprehensive School. He joined ‘The Comp’ in 1965, the first year it was open. His year’s school intake would later be referred to as ‘First Year Comp’. He was chosen to sit for the Oxford entry examination in 1971. However, he passed it over because his girlfriend was going to Portsmouth Polytechnic. He also studied there – Russian Language and Soviet Studies – and his replacement for the exam went to Oxford.
After finishing his degree, he moved to s’Hertogenbosch (Den Bosch) in The Netherlands for nine years. Then he worked for his father with his brothers for thirteen years. In 2004, he moved to Thailand with his Thai wife. He is still there now, living in her remote rice-farming village in the north.
The Welsh Author Emerges.
Owen began creating websites to pay the bills at first. However, they needed a lot of fresh content to keep them high in the search engine rankings. In 2011, he realised that he had 145 websites and had written 1,200,000 words that year to support them. After a few beers one night, it dawned on him that he was writing the equivalent of ten largish novels a year to support websites that would crumble after his death. He had always enjoyed writing, and had started a book in 2004, when he first arrived in Thailand. He resolved to finish the novel.
Owen Jones’ Books.
He published Daddy’s Hobby, the first volume in the series Behind The Smile: The Story Of Lek, A Bar Girl in Pattaya in April 2012 – eight years after he had started it. However, volume two, An Exciting Future, appeared six months later, and Maya – Illusion, volume three, three months after that.
Within seven years, he had written fifty-two novels. These included twenty-three novelettes called The Psychic Megan Series, which is based on ideas that he had learned from his Spiritualist family, and set in Barry. Meanwhile, Behind The Smile has grown to seven volumes comprising 720,000 words. He finds it difficult to stick to one genre, he says. Although most of his books involve some supernatural or paranormal content.
However, even that is not the full story. He has written a military drama mini-series called Dead Centre, which is about a new form of terrorism barely contemplated because it is so awful.
Prolific Welsh Author’s Future.
I asked him why he has not sought representation in the traditional publishing industry. He replies that he had made several half-hearted attempts to attract interest from literary agents five or six years ago, but he gave up, because so few of them replied. I also asked whether he might try to become a traditionally-published Welsh author again. He replied “Maybe”, but didn’t look at all enthusiastic. “I think that The Psychic Megan Series might be ‘quite easy’ to sell. However, writing to these people and waiting months for a reply is such a mind-numbingly boring slog!”
In my opinion, the 68 years old Welsh author from Barry, Owen Jones, has never really cared whether he goes down the traditional route of well-known authors or not. He is quite happy sitting in his quiet, remote Thai village organising the translation and narration of his existing books, and writing the occasional new one.
Owen Jones , the extremely prolific Welsh author, now has more than a thousand books with his name on registered at the British Library, so he must be doing something right!
Behind The Smile – but what else could be lingering there? A genuine smile is often contagious… it makes people feel good about themselves. However, is there something else behind the smile like sadness, deceit, or even danger? Have you ever wondered why someone smiles when they’re happy, but frowns when they’re sad? The answer lies in the coding of our brains, and some people have learned how to use smiling to affect us on this neurological level for their own purposes. Astute people can usually read warning signs, but that doesn’t always work.
Is it really just a smile?
If you’re wondering why some people seem to have an easy time smiling while others struggle with it, here are some things to consider:
1. People who smile often tend to have a positive outlook on life. They see the glass as half full rather than half empty.
2. Smiles are contagious. So when you smile, you’re likely to make other people react in the same way.
3. Smiling releases endorphins into our brains. Endorphins are natural painkillers that help reduce stress and improve mood.
What could be lingering behind the smile?
Smiling is one of the easiest ways to make others feel better about themselves. In fact, research shows that a smile can actually affect the brain’s reward system, making us happier than we would otherwise be. However, not everyone smiles at every appropriate situation. Some people smile in order to hide what they don’t want you to see. Think of the magicians and their distraction techniques, or the shopkeeper with the happy face, or the con-artist trying to sell you a pup.
Are You Smiling Because You’re Happy or Sad?
If you find yourself smiling when you aren’t feeling happy, then you might be suffering from a condition called “smile disorder”. This is a common problem among children and teens, but adults also sometimes develop this condition. Smiling is an automatic response to positive emotions. People who suffer from these disorders often have trouble controlling their facial muscles, so that they appear to be smiling even though they’re not. They may also have difficulty recognizing other people’s smiles because they don’t feel as genuine.
Behind The Smile – The Story of Lek, A Bar Girl In Pattaya
The theme of what can be behind a smile is central to Welsh writer Owen Jones’ epic series about a bar girl in Pattaya. Lek had been a happy child and adolescent growing up in a peaceful, not-poor, rice-farming village in northern Thailand. She had expected nothing more out of life than all the other girls born there for generations. That is, to work on the family smallholding, get married have children, work some more and then to retire to look after the grandchildren. So, had it been for hundreds of years.
However, Lek’s father had borrowed money from the bank – a new phenomenon, that he hadn’t completely understood. When he died suddenly from diabetes, the family was told to pay up or get out. It had been a shock, because they hadn’t known about the loan.
There had been only one solution. Lek, as the eldest child of four, had had to go to Pattaya to work in a bar. She missed her family tremendously, but worked in the bar smiling at the punters. However, she was there for ten long years, and all that time, there was something else going on behind the smile.
You can read Owen Jones’ fascinatingly poignant series here:
Daddy’s Hobby by Owen Jones is the first novel from this Welsh writer. It explores why so many girls work in Pattaya and how they fare. It is his best-selling book.
Daddy’s Hobby by Owen Jones is an insightful look at why tens of thousands of young women choose to enter the Pattaya sex tourism industry, and how many of them get on. They and other attractions bring more than a million tourists to Pattaya every year. Most of them are men with money looking for a good time.
Daddy’s Hobby by Owen Jones – Origins.
In the mid-to late Seventies, Owen Jones was working in the south Netherland’s city of s’Hertogenbosch (Den Bosch) in Noord Brabant. One day, a popular new bar opened up at the bottom of the street he lived in. It was a ‘Relax Bar’, a concept he didn’t understand, but he liked the sound of the music. One afternoon, he ventured inside. The bar was practically empty despite the fact that the landlord was very friendly and played lots of Heavy Metal, which was very popular at the time.
After a while he noticed a few scantily-clad young ladies looking at him from the darker recesses at the back of the room. When he went to the toilet, he was left in no doubt what a relax bar was. The owner/barman, whose name was Rick, I think, played the Meatloaf album ‘Like A Bat Out of Hell’ from cover to cover three or four times a day and sold marijuana, which had been decriminalised. This record more than any other brought the ‘house dancing girls’ out onto the floor.
The bar was called ‘Daddy’s Hobby’. I liked everything about it including the name, which I thought was very clever. Within a month or two, it was the busiest bar in the city. However, sadly, within a year, Rick had been murdered and his bar burned down. We all thought that it had to do with drugs.
Daddy’s Hobby by Owen Jones – Development.
In the early 2,000’s Owen Jones moved to Pattaya, and started going out with the cashier of the first bar he had a drink in. It put him in a ‘trusted position’ with ‘the girls’. Soon most of the thirty-odd girls who worked there were seeking his advice. Their favourite topic was how best to write saucy texts and emails to their ‘boyfriends’. Most of these had already returned home to their wives or girlfriends in Europe and elsewhere, but mostly the UK. That bar was a more flagrant example of Rick’s Daddy’s Hobby, but without the drugs.
After a few weeks, he had inadvertently collected many scraps of paper with translated messages on them. So, he sought the girls’ permission to write them into a book. No-one disapproved when he promised to use false names. It was funny, he said, because all the girls and most of the clients were already doing that anyway. Everybody was lying, especially the men. He recalls that he had never met so many navy SEALS, SAS, commandos, MI5 and CIA operatives in his life before. Not a one of them was a carpenter or civil servant, and they were all single, looking for a wife!!
There was no other name for the book than Daddy’s Hobby, subtitled Behind The Smile but for various reasons, it took him eight years to self-publish it.
Daddy’s Hobby by Owen Jones – Sequels.
Owen Jones used the name of Lek for his lead female character. She was also the life and soul of the bar, and didn’t mind the author using her real name. She too is sadly long dead. He used the Welsh name Craig for the main male, although there are many other dramatis personae in the novel. When he was writing the book, it was the Lek character that dictated to him in his head what he must write. He had already determined that the book should be 100,000 words long, but when he reached that level, it was clear that Lek hadn’t finished her story. So, Owen closed book one, published it, and started a sequel.
You may be wondering why it took eight years to bring Daddy’s Hobby to market, if it was being dictated.
“Well, when I looked at Craig’s character I could see too much of myself… I just was not prepared to share it at that point”, he says. “I nearly gave up several times, but Lek and I stuck with it and produced a result”.
He did not like the idea of calling the second volume Daddy’s Hobby 2, so he gave it the name of a significant chapter in volume one, An Exciting Future. It now needed a series title to bind them together and that became Behind The Smile. The books are frequently referred to as Behind The Smile.
Lek kept up the pressure for several more years until Behind The Smile consisted of seven volumes, of 720,000 words.
Daddy’s Hobby – the Future.
“Although the Lek in my head was the inspiration of the actual stories, encouragement came from elsewhere. It was also more important”, he says.
“My stepmother hated the book, and two of my three brothers have never mentioned any of my fifty-odd novels. However, one thought it was fantastic though, and asked me to write a sequel. I had also run a competition for a free copy. Coincidentally, the woman who won it was a student journalist, who wrote an encouraging review. I opened the door to Lek again, and started volume two.
“Suddenly, I started to receive encouragement from complete strangers all around the world. Unfortunately, I have still heard nothing from friends and family from my home town. It used to upset me a lot, until I learned that that was quite common in the UK. People seem to resent someone improving themselves”.
He claims to know three readers, who hadn’t read a book since leaving school – one of them being eighty-four! Two others have since written novels, and one has moved to Thailand to see it ‘for himself’! Many readers have sought him out for a drink when they are visiting Thailand, and others went to Spain and Wales to meet him.
Owen says that he hasn’t been back to Pattaya for several years. However, when he was last there tourists and expats knew of his books, and some had read them all. Its particularly affected him when a young Thai woman ran up to him, kissed him on the cheek, and said: “You’re the lovely man who writes nice things about Pattaya bar girls, aren’t you. Thank you very much”.
Every month, he sells several box sets of seven, who can only be going off reviews or recommendation.
Behind The Smile by Owen Jones – Narrations and Translations.
In these days of Covid, it has been difficult to find further inspiration for what he calls the Lek Series. Between 2016 and 2018, he and his Thai wife (that first girl, the cashier, that he met in Pattaya) lived in Andalucía, Spain. From 2018 to 2020, the tried living in Wales. However, Pritti Patel and the Tories made it too difficult for his wife to obtain a residency permit. He says that he will never forgive them for that.
However, while in Spain, Owen started to have his books translated and narrated. Principally in Spanish so that he could sell them to the local Spanish as well as the expats. He soon started to receive offers of collaboration from all over the world in fifteen languages. Since living back in Thailand, and he has been in lockdown in the village because of Covid-related travel restrictions. So, he has been concentrating on these narrations and translations. He now has more than one thousand books in thirty-eight languages registered in his name in the British Library.
“I still would prefer to be writing fresh material though”, he adds with a hint of sadness.
Beach Road Pattaya is by far the most famous Thai beach road and is the busiest road in the city of Pattaya as far as tourists, pedestrians and vehicles are concerned. It is also the most scenic because Beach Road in Pattaya runs literally the width of the pavement from the golden sand of the clean beach and only metres from the sparkling blue sea. This is the largest of the beaches in Pattaya.
Beach Road begins at the entrance to Walking Street in the south of the city and continues in a gentle curve for approximately 2.8 kilometres before heading east away from the beach at the Dusit Thani Hotel and continuing a few hundred metres towards the Dolphin Roundabout in the south-east.
Having expressed the dimensions of Beach Road in that way, the flow of the one-way traffic is towards Walking Street. This makes sense because the southern end is less busy, and the action tends to be at the northern, more densely populated area.
Travelling along Beach Road in Pattaya
This is far from being a problem though, because of the Baht Bus service. A Baht Bus is an open sided pickup. The majority of them are privately owned, but city licensed, and charge just ten Baht for any length journey, which means that you can travel from your isolated hotel in the south, the full length of Beach Road to Walking Street and only pay ten Baht.
When you want to return the other way, you take a side-street at right angles to the beach, walk to the end, where you will come to Second Road and the traffic flows in the opposite direction.
Beach Road and Second Road
Between Beach Road and Second Road, there run dozens of side-streets, called soi, which contain most of the bars, of which there are many and various kinds. The nightlife of this Pattaya beach is legendary the world over with all kinds of bars ranging from Starbucks and Planet Hollywood to girly bar discos. There are also fantastic restaurants, especially seafood ones, along the front mostly near the centre of Beach Road, which is around Soi 7.
Must-see
If you want to get a flavour for this exciting beach in Thailand, try searching for: ‘Youtube Pattaya Beach Road’ and you will find many videos posted.
Beach Road Pattaya is a must-see for any visitor to the city, and a trip the full length of it on a Baht Bus is a must-do.
This blog post, Daddy’s Hobby‘s Previews contains previews on Amazon of BEHIND THE SMILE – The Story of Lek, A Bar Girl in Pattaya” volume 1: Daddy’s Hobby in all the languages I currently have available: English, German and Portuguese. In some cases, there will be special offers and free audiobooks, while stocks last.
Lek was born the eldest child of four in a typical rice farming family. She did not expect to do anything any different from the other girls in her class in the northern rice belt of Thailand.
Typically that would be: work in the fields for a few years; have a few babies; give them to mum to take care of and back to work until her kids had their own children and she could stop working to take care of them.
One day a catastrophe occurred out of the blue – her father died young and with huge debts that the family knew nothing about. Lek was twenty and she was the only one who could prevent foreclosure. However, the only way she knew was to go to work in her cousin’s bar in Pattaya.
She went as a waitress-cum-cashier, but when she realised that she was pregnant by her worthless, estranged husband, things had to change. She had the baby, gave it to her mother to look after and went back to work. However, now she needed real money to provide a better life for her child and to make up for spending its whole youth 500 miles away. She drifted into the tourist sex industry.
The book relates some of her ‘adventures’, her dreams and nightmares and her ‘modus operandi’. It tries to show, from Lek’s point of view, what it really is like to be a Thai bar girl – the hopes and frustrations, the hopes and the let-downs, the hopes and the lies and deceit that are part of her every day life.
One day she meets a man she likes and he likes her too. Nothing new there, it had happened hundreds of times, but she feels that it is different. They have a wonderful four weeks together and then he goes home – as they all had, leaving more promises and more hopes.
This one returns, but real life with a real boyfriend is not as easy as she had dreamed it would be. They go through good and bad times, but will they stay together and for how long?
After all she has been through, will she be able to be a regular girlfriend or even a wife again? Will she ever really be able to trust a man enough again either? Or would she be better off giving up her dreams and carrying on working in the bar?
Lek begins to find out that getting what you wish for is not always as good as you thought it would be.
‘Behind The Smile’ refers to the fact that Thailand is known the world over as ‘The Land of Smiles’.
Lek was born the eldest child of four in a typical rice farming family. She did not expect to do anything any different from the other girls in her class in the northern rice belt of Thailand.
Typically that would be: work in the fields for a few years; have a few babies; give them to mum to take care of and back to work until her kids had their own children and she could stop working to take care of them.
One day a catastrophe occurred out of the blue – her father died young and with huge debts that the family knew nothing about. Lek was twenty and she was the only one who could prevent foreclosure. However, the only way she knew was to go to work in her cousin’s bar in Pattaya.
Daddy’s Hobby
She went as a waitress-cum-cashier to Pattaya, but when she realised that she was pregnant by her worthless, estranged husband, things had to change. She had the baby, gave it to her mother to look after and went back to work. However, now she needed real money to provide a better life for her child and to make up for spending its whole youth 500 miles away. She drifted into the tourist sex industry.
The book relates some of her ‘adventures’, her dreams and nightmares and her ‘modus operandi’. It tries to show, from Lek’s point of view, what it really is like to be a Pattaya Thai bar girl – the hopes and frustrations, the hopes and the let-downs, the hopes and the lies and deceit that are part of her every day life.
One day she meets a man she likes and he likes her too. Nothing new there, it had happened hundreds of times, but she feels that it is different. They have a wonderful four weeks together and then he goes home… as they all had, leaving more promises and more hopes.
This one returns. However, real life with a real boyfriend is not as easy as she had dreamed it would be. They go through good and bad times, but will they stay together and for how long?
Behind The Smile
After all she has been through, will she be able to be a regular girlfriend or even a wife again? Will she ever really be able to trust a man enough again either? Or would she be better off giving up her dreams and carrying on working in the bar?
Lek begins to find out that getting what you wish for is not always as good as you thought it would be.
Behind The Smile – Daddy’s Hobby: ‘Behind The Smile’ refers to the fact that Thailand is known the world over as ‘The Land of Smiles’, and Daddy’s Hobby was the bar where Lek worked.
Behind The Smile – Daddy’s Hobby audiobook link: Tektime
The Beginning – volume 7 in the series Behind The Smile
The Beginning
Behind The Smile – The Story of Lek, A Bar Girl in Pattaya
(volume 7)
by Owen Jones
Review by Barry Boy
The Beginning is volume seven in the much-liked series Behind The Smile – The Story of Lek, A Bar Girl in Pattaya by Owen Jones.
Volume One in the series began when Lek was twenty-two and already working in Daddy’s Hobby in Pattaya, Volume Seven goes back to before she was even born – just before, to the days when her mother was young and working in the ‘na’ or rice fields.
Even nowadays, life as a Thai rice-farmer is hard, but for many, there is some mechanisation, but, then, in the early Seventies, it was mostly manual labour.
Pang and her husband, Maar, lived with Pang’s parents and worked their land. They all got on well, and worked for a better future for their family. One day, Pang announces that she is pregnant with their first child, and their lives change, as it always has done in all families around the world.
Lek has a happy childhood on the exterior, but she has her internal dialogue about her fears and insecurities. Ayr and Goong, her best friends, are there to help, but they drift apart for a while when Lek is forced to leave school at the age of twelve.
The stigma is to remain with her all her life.
The Beginning is written in the third person and the cover is apposite, being the same, except in title and colour, as the previous six. It is instantly recognisable in pink, being a diluted form of the colour of Volume One, which is red.
The Beginning: Behind The Smile -The Story of Lek, A Bar Girl in Pattaya (volume 7) will be published on December 26th, 2017 for $3.99, but the price will rice on January 1st to $4.99. However, you can pre-order it now for $2.99 at a discount of up to 45% and have it delivered to your device on Boxing Day, while you are recovering from a hectic Christmas Day.
The Beginning – volume 7 in the series Behind The Smile
Lek – The Beginning Progress Update
I just made progress on Lek – The Beginning! So far I’m 71% complete on the Revising phase.
[mybookprogress progress=”0.7141034949665417″ phase_name=”Revising” book=”4″ book_title=”Lek – The Beginning” bar_color=”CB3301″ cover_image=”8784″ mbt_book=”7781″]
Place your pre-order for Lek7, The Beginningof Behind The Smile – the story of Lek, a bar girl in Pattaya, now and have it delivered on Boxing Day with a saving of 45%
I just made progress on Lek – The Beginning! So far I’m 59% complete on the Week 4 phase. 7 Days remain until the deadline.
[mybookprogress progress=”0.58744″ phase_name=”Week 4″ deadline=”1512000000″ book=”4″ book_title=”Lek – The Beginning” bar_color=”CB3301″ cover_image=”8741″ mbt_book=”7781″]
Lek The Beginning, now shortened to The Beginning, is now available as a pre-order from Kobo, Smashwords, iTunes, and Amazon at $2.99
Pre-orders really help the author gain sales ranking, as the sales all go through on the day of release, 26th December 2017, when the book will be delivered to your ereader or computer automatically.
What a nice present to wake up to on Boxing Day!
To thank you for committing your money early, I am giving a 40% discount on all pre-orders. If you buy it on the 26th or after, it will cost $3.99. In the New Year, the price will rise again to $4.99
I just made progress on Lek – The Beginning! So far I’m 82% complete on the Week 3 phase. 2 Days remain until the deadline.
[mybookprogress progress=”0.81784″ phase_name=”Week 3″ deadline=”1511222400″ book=”4″ book_title=”Lek – The Beginning” bar_color=”CB3301″ cover_image=”8741″ mbt_book=”7781″]
I just made progress on Lek – The Beginning! So far I’m 68% complete on the Week 1 phase. 1 Days remain until the deadline.
[mybookprogress progress=”0.68048″ phase_name=”Week 1″ deadline=”1510012800″ book=”4″ book_title=”Lek – The Beginning” bar_color=”CB3301″ cover_image=”8741″ mbt_book=”7781″]
I just made progress on Lek – The Beginning! So far I’m 63% complete on the Week 1 phase. 1 Days remain until the deadline.
[mybookprogress progress=”0.56424″ phase_name=”Week 1″ deadline=”1510012800″ book=”4″ book_title=”Lek – The Beginning” bar_color=”CB3301″ cover_image=”8741″ mbt_book=”7781″]
April 5th is important to many people in the UK because it is the start of the new tax year. I and millions of other Brits had to devote hours this week every year in order to get our taxes out of the way.
Then I moved here to Thailand and that all stopped for me, because I was not earning in the UK or resident there. To be honest, I wasn’t earning much anywhere, but I had assets and the cost of living in rural Thailand is low compared with Thai cities and especially the West, although it is rising quickly and has been for a few years.
This week of April 5th is important to Thais in general, because it will be Songkhran in nine days and people have already started to come back for the Thais’ favourite annual festival, the old New Year (before they fell into line with the West and adopted January 1st). I have greeted four Thais returning from abroad already today.
It is the best time of the year to be in Thailand without a shadow of a doubt.
Then there is my on personal reason for liking today. On the night of the 4th April, four years ago, I sent the manuscript of my first novel to Kindle and CreateSpace and told my family.
It was Daddy’s Hobby, the first in the series Behind The Smile and it had taken me five years of anguish and self-doubt to write. It was approved the next day; I ordered five copies and so did a few others – my family, presumably.
It was a very happy day for me and the beginning of a new career.
Funny old life, isn’t it?
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Behind The Smile v6: The Dream is up there online, but I didn’t rush the other two out. I am out of the house now, having a pint and writing to you, but when I get back, I will finish the job by putting some advertising up. By the way, for those of you who collect the paperback version of my books, Lek6 will be available from CreateSpace and Amazon tomorrow afternoon (18th Nov). Ebook readers will have to wait until two weeks today.
I think that I will make a habit of putting my books on CreateSpace first from now on.
Yesterday, I was wondering what to do with my novel, Andropov’s Cuckoo. Well, I had a flash of inspiration, I think, but it involves Amazon, so needs to be thought through carefully. They are not my favourite publisher at the moment (because KindleSelect is such a rip-off for writers). However, they still sell more books for me than any, or even all of the other big four combined.
Even CreateSpace sells more books for me a month than XinXii and Kobo combined!
The market is not good though. Much worse than last year and even much worse than the first half of this year, which was showing a lot of promise (for me). It is depressing and somehow, I don’t think that adding three more novels to my inventory this month is going to buy me a better Christmas Holiday.
I still haven’t been able to figure out why the market collapsed so viciously. In May, I think it was, sales fell month on month by thirty percent, and have not stopped diving since. They are over sixty percent down at the moment.
That is quite something, especially when you factor in that the number of books I have to sell has risen by 17% so far this year. In fact, thinking about it, depressing doesn’t cover it at all. I will attempt my monthly analysis tomorrow, but I think that the governments of the world are trying to talk their way out of this recession, since their policies of austerity have failed dismally, and now we’re got to go and waste billions wasting ISIS in revenge for Paris.
Where will it all end, eh? I doubt that anyone has the foggiest notion, but I don’t think that it is going to be where and when most ordinary people would like it to.
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As my regular readers will know, life has been pretty frustrating for me for the last couple of days, but last night the thought occurred to me that the reason why Amazon and Facebook might be behaving oddly was the image driver because they are heavy users of images. So, I told my browser to check the Flash app and it was number thirteen; the latest is nineteen. It took two hours to download the update, the solution was that simple.
However, the solution was simple, but why did it take so long to fix? There must have been tens of millions of us with the same problem, because a Flash update usually takes ten seconds, not two hours. How did we get to the state where one company, like Adobe, can ruin the Internet experience of so many people?
My personal solution was to get out of the clutches of the idiots that allowed that to happen. I remember reading a few years ago, that Apple had dumped Adobe. Was this why? Had they foreseen that that problem could happen?
So, I looked at the price of an Apple Mac, an Apple Air, and was surprised at the cost. $1,000 for an eleven-inch screen and $3,000 for a fifteen-inch. $3k is 90,000 Baht, but a fifteen-inch PC is only 20,000 Baht. It is hard to justify the expense, but I would dearly love to escape Microsoft and Adobe’s stranglehold on me, to say nothing of Windows 10, which I dislike too.
All five of the current volumes of Behind The Smile and their new covers are now live on Amazon, so anyone who wants to own the very first set of them should buy now, as they have only been on sale for a few hours.
On a completely different tack, as I was walking here today, I had the strange sensation that I was a lot shorter than usual. I am six feet tall and weigh 120 kilos, and have always felt big, but earlier I felt a foot or more shorter. Does anyone know why I might have imagined that?
We all shrink when we pass a certain age, did I just experience a real drop in physical stature, albeit very small?
Please don’t tell me that the solution is to grow up a bit…
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That dreary problem with the Internet seemed to be over this morning and I got three new versions of Lek up (new covers and updated interiors). It would normally have taken thirty minutes each, but I didn’t mind spending three hours on the job. Then, shortly after six a.m. the dreary problem started again.
Four hours later, I still haven’t been able to get number four up on either of the Amazon sites, so switched to Kobo, Lulu et al, and they were working fine, so the problem has to be with Amazon. However, I couldn’t get into Facebook either, so perhaps they are both under attack.
Therefore, I have come out to write to you again, much to the chagrin of my wife, who commented that I was leaving an hour early. I don’t see the point of sitting there though, getting angry with things that no-one can fix for me though – I might have a stroke or heart attack!
It is nice out, but too hot to go for a stroll. It’s funny, a week ago people were saying how unusually cold, dreary and wet it was. It was (25c), and now it is unusually hot for the time of the year (35c). In fact, the shopkeeper, the tightest woman in the village, as anyone would tell you, has put a fan on me. I might be exaggerating if I guess that this might be the fifth time she has done that in ten years.
I am still trying to think of a title for my NaNoWriMo novel, and it just came to me that this would be the ideal opportunity to write a Christmas book. Not that I have had much experience with Christmas for ages – perhaps forty years.
I’ll put my mind to it when I stop talking.
I hate oilcloth on a table, don’t you? It makes your forearms sweat and retains the condensation from the beer bottle leaving difficult-to-see puddles for you to put your Kindle down in.
I shouldn’t complain though, I am sitting at her private table because it’s too hot for me where I normally drink.
Oh, if anyone is thinking of buying the Behind The Smile paperbacks, the new cover should be approved tomorrow, 23-10-15, so start with the new number one, but I will be keeping two-to-five available in the old style, for those who want a set of sorts. Number six will only be with the new cover. And, if you display your ebook covers as some do, tomorrow you will be able to refresh what you have and they will all match again.
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I haven’t been around much for the last two months, as my regular readers will know, because I have been writing the sixth book in the series Behind The Smile, commonly referred to as Lek 6.
Lek 6 took quite a long time to write. OK, the first one took five years and the second six months, but I did finish the fourth in thirty days (for NaNoWriMo 2014).
Lek 6 took me fifty days. For the sake of comparison, I should point out that all the Leks are 112k words long. It was the hardest of them to write.
Anyway, while I was ‘away’ writing Lek 6, several other things happened.
We had a four-foot Clouded Monitor lizard move into our garden, but my wife and our dog hassled it so much that it moved out again. Then a two-foot version moved in and a week later moved on as well. In my eleven years here, they are the only two I have ever seen or heard of. I think that that’s quite something.
Gail, our granddaughter, was one on September 21st, and it seems that all of a sudden she is learning to speak and do things she hasn’t been taught. She speaks several words now that tell us she wants something like food and water, but if she yawns and you say ‘sleep’, she puts a hand to her head and tilts it over. She also switches the fan on and off, opens sliding doors and looks for the remote.
Yesterday she was crying, which is unusual for her, and the only thing that was wrong was that her nappy was soiled. She did that again today. I love to watch her learning, but God knows how she can understand when adults use Thai baby-talk on her, because I can’t fathom it and I’ve been here ten times longer than she has.
On a less happy note, this blog spent two weeks switched off due to the incompetence of my host, Hostgator. They said that it is all right now, but it was down twice this morning for a few minutes. Steer clear of them until they sort themselves out. Oh, and if you want to keep tabs on your own blog, install the free Jetpack plug-in. It’s great – loads of features.
I am missing writing already, but I will stave off the pangs by posting to you every day until November 1st, when NaNoWriMo 2015 starts. I hope that you will join me in that. I still don’t have a clue what to write about.
And lastly for today, going back to Lek 6, the artist who made the first five covers for the Behind The Smile series has disappeared (from me), so I am having to redesign them all so that they match. (Writers of series take note).
So, if you have a few volumes with the original covers, you will still be able to purchase the first five the same, but Lek 6 will be different. Those starting to read the series from scratch should buy the new covers. The new Lek 6 cover is above, what do you think of it (on the latest one, the writing is not so cramped).
