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Getting My Thai Wife to the UK (part 213)

Getting My Thai Wife to the UK (part 213)

Those of my regular readers who have followed the five-year saga of my trying to get my Thai wife into the UK will recognize the reference, because Getting My Thai Wife to the UK has been my biggest problem for a decade.

Well, I have had some good news today. An acquaintance of mine has successfully taken his Thai wife from Spain to the UK with very little hassle. This is exceptionally good news for me because our circumstances are almost identical.

We have both been married to a Thai woman for more than ten years, been married in Thailand, and lived in Spain for more than two years.

When my friend took his Thai wife to the UK, he went through the Channel Tunnel. They were stopped and questioned, but after providing the necessary evidence that they were married, were admitted with a visa 'without end' - in other words, there was an entry date, but no required exit date - an open-ended right to stay.

This is much more than I would ever have hoped for!

It gives one plenty of time to apply for a residency card. This is fantastic, because one of the requirements of a residency card for a Asian wife is a six-month tenancy agreement, and I am just learning how difficult it is to find accommodation.

Brexiteers' Lies

In fact, it is horrendous, no matter how easy the Brexiteers say getting into this country is! Pure lies - the UK is famous for being VERY tough on immigration - the rest is lies. I have been married for more than ten years - if it is so easy, why am I struggling and have I been for more than five years to get her in?

Answer me that Brexiteers! You have been hoodwinked...

Now, we are in the UK, but the quest did not stop when we arrive. It gives us a chance to recoup though, and to be honest, we are in need of another victory, as the last were obtaining a Spanish residency card for my Thai wife and a UK visa for her. Next we will need somewhere permanent to lay our heads, and after that the big one - a UK Residency Card...

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All the best,

Owen

Podcast: Getting My Thai Wife to the UK

Carling Black Label

Carling Black Label

I think I remember when Carling Black Label was first introduced to the widespread British beer-drinking public. There was an advert for Carling lager on television and my mother commented that that was my father's latest favourite drink.

I was still underage, and I remember commenting that I couldn't understand why people would want to drink pint after pint of beer just because they were thirsty.

She gave me a verbal pat on the head for my naivety, when my mother said, "There's a good boy! I hope you remember that when you are older".

Well, I do remember what was said, obviously, but adhering to it is often much more difficult.

Anyway, last month, I returned to Wales after fifteen years of travelling in Asia and walked into a bar. I ordered a pint of Black Label from the helpful young barmaid, but she looked back at me with a completely blank expression. Her manageress must have felt a vibe, because she was quick to ask if there was a problem, which there wasn't really.

"This gentleman wants a pint of Black Label, but that's whiskey, isn't it?".

"Lager, sir?" she asked, pointing out the relatively obscure black label on the pump. "People call it Carling, sir", she informed me moving off, but repeating 'Carling Black Label' for her underling.

Change for Change's Sake?

Or is it change just to justify a job title?

I have noticed so many changes in our medium-sized home town since I've been back - some of them completely pointless. Like renaming the Job Centre 'Job Centre Plus' even though they actually handle fewer tasks there now than they ever did before.

The Rowan Hill Hotel is another example. It used to be the most prestigious hotel in town. However, it has been renamed the Rowan Rooms. Now, it is a rather sad place for travelling reps and salespeople providing cheap run-down rooms for under-paid, over-worked mostly young people.

Not all changes are for the better, and money plays a big part it most decisions. It is just such a pity that our home town has been allowed to devolve into the very, very poor reflection of the great place it used to be to live in.

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All the best,

Owen

Podcast: Carling Black Label

August 2017

August 2017

This is the month I have tried to take off every year since I left school. August falls in the school summer holidays in the UK. When my father remarried, it was my sister's birthday on the first, my dog's on the fourth, my brother's on the seventh, mine  on the fourteenth, my real mother's on the twenty-second and a good friend's on the twenty-sixth.

It was easier to take the month off than keep making up excuses!

There are two weeks left, and I don't see those I used to know who had/have birthdays in August any more.

I wish I did.

We don't have any real friends here in Spain, no long-term ones anyway. So has it been for most of my life, but my wife is used to more. She has always had loving friends and family around her... I wish I could say the same since I first left home, but I am more than willing to accept the blame for that.

I'm tired now though; I'm fed up with fighting. I would happily give up my life tomorrow, if I could be certain that my wife would be all right, although I suppose that I know that she would be, because she is Thai, and Thais take care of their families.

I have fought with most of the people I know this year and made a tit of myself, but I am not happy and will not be until this struggle to get Neem to the UK is over. I am sorry if you got caught up in my turmoil. I have learned such a lot about why people did the things they have done in the last year.

I am tired of all the hassle, but sleep will not put it right. Death is the only answer I can see and I don't sodding care any longer. If that upsets you, well, like I said above, I have already pissed most people I know off, so what is another one?

Although I do care about my friends and family... it is just a rotten situation that we are in… and I didn’t bring my wife to Europe so that I could literally worry myself sick and so my wife would worry off ten kilos that she didn’t need to lose.

I hope that you are doing better than we are.

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All the best,

Owen

Podcast: August 2017

Search Engines

Search Engines

I should imagine that if I asked a hundred people, which is the best search engine, at least ninety percent would say Google, but how many of them ever consider using other search engines? Google has done such a tremendous job of PR that it now attracts at least 85% of search queries. In this article, I am going to look into the phenomenon of search engines.

I looked through my computer's logs and found that my blog had figured in a search that used the query 'Asus F541U Laptop Computer', because I had written a review of that computer after buying one earlier this year. First, I checked Google, the default search engine on my Asus F541U, then I checked some others – six in total. Here are the results of my article's placing or rank within those search engines:

Google: >100

Yahoo: 3rd

Bing: 2nd

Ecosia: 2nd

DuckDuckGo: 2nd

Yandex: 2nd

That's right, my article could not be found within the first 100 entries on Google, yet five other top search engines ranked it within the top three most read articles on that particular laptop.

How can that be?

It's simple, Google charges for the higher ranking slots. In other words, it takes an upfront commission on all sales made through searches made on its site, and that is why, if you enter the name of a product, the top dozen or more listings will direct you to shops where you can buy it.

I wrote my review of the Asus F541U to help people and attract them to my website, so I am not going to pay to promote it, and that means that Google is not interested in me or it.

So, if you want honest search results, you need to be careful which search engine you use, however, there are other advantages too.

For example, Ecosia donates a percentage of its profits to planting trees, and DuckDuckGo promises not to track your searches. This is important, because most search engines do, which is why, if you search for, say, the Asus F541U today, you will see ads popping up everywhere for it for the next week to come.

So, let's stop automatically going for Google. Google is basically a list of shops ranked in order of what you want and which one paid the most to get near the top. Some people might call that corrupt.

Give the other search engines a chance, you will be pleasantly surprised.

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All the best,

Owen

Podcast: Search Engines

Free Books on Amazon

Free Books and Amazon

I started a page on this blog called Free Books and, needless to say, it is very popular, receiving well over three hundred views a day. 'Free' is an extremely powerful word, so that is not surprising in itself. What does surprise many people is Amazon's attitude towards free books.

In fact, free books on Amazon are frowned upon by the giant on-line retailer, and what many bloggers don't know is that they can lose their monthly earnings if their ratio of free book give-aways to sold books is too high, and they can lose their account if it happens too often.

A blogger must consistently sell more books than he or she gives away or face the consequences.

I recently started a free book page, as I said above, but I was concerned about how far I could go, and I now realise that that is not far, however, there is a way around it, which I will explain below to those who can stick with me.

There is an option to authors publishing their books on Kindle to give them the exclusive publishing rights to your ebook and enroll it in Kindle Select.

Readers pay a monthly fee for membership to Kindle Select, and that confers upon them the right to read books for free - or at least those books that authors have put into Kindle Select.

Therefore, a blogger can offer free books on Amazon on his website, if the books are in Kindle Select, but they will only be free to Kindle Select subscribers.

Right now, you may be thinking that this is another spiral downwards in the earnings of blog- and website-owners, but there is one salvation.

If the free books that you are offering/promoting are interesting enough to make non-Kindle Select subscribers want to join up, Amazon is willing to pay the blogger $3 for giving away a free one-month trial subscription to Kindle Select.

This makes the whole process of selling books on-line even more convoluted, of course, but it is the only way that I have figured out of making money out of the powerful word 'free' in the context of free books on Amazon and not running foul of their rules.

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All the best,

Owen

Podcast: Free Books on Amazon

Residence Permit for Spain (final part)

Residence Permit for Spain (final part)

We applied for my wife's residence permit for Spain on February 14th. 2017, although we had been working on it for a year before that. When we left Thailand in May 2016, the Spanish Embassy had assured us that we had all the paperwork we needed for my wife to obtain her five-year residency card.

So, we set off for Spain. Our tactic was for me to get my residency permit first, as that would be easy for a Brit, and sure enough, I did get mine, although it took eleven weeks. My wife was told that she had the wrong  visa (a visitor's visa, not one declaring that she was the wife of an EU citizen).

So, we returned to Thailand, spent five months getting the correct papers, translations and visa and came back to Spain in January, as I said above.

The wait has been horrific! There is no more we can do but wait, but in a way, that is the problem. Now, the waiting is almost over. The five-year residence permit, in the form of a bio-metric card will be ready for collection sometime 'after August 24th.'.

However, the stress that we have been trying so hard not to let each other see is getting to us. I feel really ill and can hardly walk from backache, and my wife has lost ten kilos. She is pretending to be pleased that she has lost the weight, and I'm sure that she is, but I wish that she had lost it through dieting or exercising, not from worry.

She is now insisting that we check the police station for her permit on Tuesday - she cannot wait until Thursday. That proves to me that she is anxious about it, but we will go and look, despite the fact that it is a thirty-minute walk and I don't know whether I can do it.

Anything to stop this agonising waiting though.

** UPDATE ** My wife received her five-year residency permit on the Tuesday - Whoopee for women's intuition :-)

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All the best,

Owen

Podcast: Residence Permit for Spain (part 700)

Facebook Friends

Facebook Friends Part 1

I recently ran a campaign to drum up support for for my latest novel, and a large part of that took place on Facebook. However, I only had 1,100 Facebook friends and it soon became apparent that I would need at least double that for a campaign of thirty days. Now, obviously, not everyone you ask to become a friend fancies the idea, so to get, say, 1,500 new Facebook friends in a month, you have to invite at least fifty new Facebook friends a day.

I have had 1,100 Facebook friends for ages, but when I started recruiting in ernest, more and more people asked to become my friend too. It was as if Facebook saw that I was looking for new friends and so promoted me to others via that block on your timeline - People you may know...

However, if it is true that Facebook helped me get new friends, it is also true that they discouraged me from talking to them. In the morning, I would start asking my Facebook friends to check out my book and vote for it if they felt able to, but after about twenty such messages, I invariably received a warning that I was probably violating their TOS.

I was even banned for twenty-four hours once. However, I soon settled into a pattern of waiting for the warning, and then doing ten an hour until I reached my goal of a hundred a day - 3,000 in the month. I fell a bit short because I only had 2,600 Facebook friends, but I will have the shortfall by the time I finish my next novel.

I had 3,220 visitors to my target URL, although KindleScout, the hosts don't reveal how many voted. My book was deemed HOT for 393 hours out of the maximum of 720, so draw your own conclusions. I think that most people I asked went there, and most of those voted for my book.

Now the fun part. Of my existing Facebook friends, the original 1,100, not many, a few hundred, reported back that they had helped, although that doesn't mean that the others didn't. I probably wouldn't tell a friend that I had helped either. However, well over half of the new Facebook friends told me that they had voted for my book., and I think that I would with a new friend as well.

There were several splinter groups, which are interesting.

There were about fifteen who asked me to return 'the favour'. When I asked how, they told me to buy their book, read it and write a review for Amazon and Goodreads - about four days' work, and I would have to but their book, in exchange for their two-minute vote on my cover and blurb! I should coco! Needless to say, they are no longer friends.

Then there were the twenty or so who explained I detail that they were busy professionals with no time for trivial activities. One man wrote me four long emails explaining how little time he had. It would have taken only two minutes to click NOMINATE on the strength of the cover and the 100-word blurb!

There was one man who said that he was very sorry, but he could not access the Internet... he was saying that via Facebook's Messenger! I don't know whether he was doolally, or he thought I was.

Then there was a huge group of 'beautiful women'. This group is the one I found the most interesting. Naturally... but more of them next time :-)

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All the best,

Owen

Podcast: Facebook Friends Part 1

Facebook Friends Part 2

Facebook Friends Part 2

(From part one: "Then there was a huge group of 'beautiful women'. This group is the one I found most interesting. Naturally...")

I would say there were about four hundred in my group of new Facebook friends. They all came from Texas, and most of them from Austin. None of them had any friends, or one or two older men, no interests, no place of birth, zilch. Most of these liars had a birth date in the Nineties. Only about a dozen of these females, if that is what they were, complied with my request to vote for my book. Most ignored it and asked whether I was married, had kids, made good money, owned my own house, etc. When I say most, I mean 395 out of 400!

I started to wonder about these people after about ten of them asked me to send them an iTunes card. So, I started asking for selfies taken there and then, in an attempt to check that they were actually women. About half sent me photos that could have been copied from anywhere. I assume that they were older women, in a relationship or even men.

When I questioned them further, some got angry, some sent me nude photos (again could have been copied from any porn site, and some, probably a hundred, said the camera on their smartphone was broken. About a hundred sent me probably genuine selfies, some rude, and offered to come and live with me 'because they had fallen for me'.

Further conversation revealed that nearly all the women were currently in sub-Saharan Africa attending their sick mother, but would be returning to Austin 'soon'.

This is an industry, really... a large industry. Nearly all those people were African, but there were other groups of Asians and South Americans. Mostly on the make. Many young women in the last two groups offered private, live sex shows for payment, but I never asked how much. $5-$10 would be my guess. I did see a few free samples and they did seem live, as opposed to pre-recorded.

I met about a dozen men who asked me to help them get funds out of their country by giving them my bank details, but they stood no chance.

Finally, I met two women, one in Mexico and one in Ghana who were brilliant. They both offered to help me (in non-sexual ways), and I think that we will be friends for a long time.

So, that was my experience - two friends out of the new fifteen hundred.

However, I learned to take precautions with my Facebook account's permissions, after one angry person started posting on my timeline in an obnoxious manner because I wouldn't buy her an iTunes card and I felt really sorry for a girl who was (genuinely) worried about her mother's health. She wanted $200 to set up a fruit stall, but I didn't send it.

The Beginning - volume 7 in the series Behind The Smile - my NaNoWriMo 2017 entry

NaNoWriMo 2017

I just finished NaNoWriMo 2017, my fifth consecutive NaNoWriMo and I still enjoy it enormously. I overheard a few people talking about it a while ago, and all three of them had written their entry during the year, so that their annual novel would get a sticker. I think that's really sad, because the race to produce 50,000 words in thirty days is what it is all about. Pushing yourself, and having a good time with others, tens of thousands around the world, who are in the same boat.

I normally write my 50k within a fortnight, and I have a friend who often writes two books during the month, but you can take the whole month to finish your novel, if you like. Then it has earned it a badge to go on its cover.

After that, you can take as long as you like to add to, edit and publish it. In fact, I still haven't published my 2016 entry, Daisy's Chain, yet, although it is now 80,000 and fully edited.

My latest entry, for NaNoWriMo 2017, entitled Lek - The Beginning, is still languishing on my desktop at 50,500 words, but it is the seventh in my series called 'Behind The Smile' and fans are waiting for it. Some have even pre-ordered it already, because I have promised to deliver it on Boxing Day - 26th. December, 2017. You can pre-order it too here:

The Beginning Lek7

In the first three years I took part, there were considerable incentives to accept and complete the NaNo challenge, but they were pretty poor this year, like 2016. Before, you got things like a free hardback, or two paperbacks of your work, but now the 'prizes' are 'a month's trial' or '10-20% a year's subscription'.

I didn't see anything in the list that was worth having, which is a shame, but I suspect that it is a reflection of the poor state of the book market, which is also a symptom of the disaster our so-called betters have made of our economies around the world.

NaNo staff would deny that these gifts are incentives, probably calling them rewards, and they are right. NaNo is a personal challenge to write those 50k words in November, and successfully completing it, should be reward enough. However, it is always nice to get something for nothing even if it is not called 'winning'.

If you have always wanted to write a book, do it, and if you would like the moral support of thousands near you and worldwide, try NaNoWriMo 2017 next November. It is free to enter and even if you do not succeed, you will have made a start, which you can finish at your leisure until the next NaNo starts.

If you do it, look me (owenjones) up on their website, and we can be writing buddies.

I hope to meet you there!

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All the best,

Owen

Podcast: NaNoWriMo 2017

Reviews of Books on Amazon

The Reviews of Books on Amazon

I have been with Amazon for a relatively very long time - since a few weeks after it started, I think, but I can't help thinking the the people at the top  - the ones running the firm (that might not include Jeff Bezos, the guy who set it up) are buffoons. Why? Well, let's start with the question of reviews of books on Amazon.

They tried to fix the problem of sham reviews of books on Amazon, but all they ended up doing was punishing small authors by hunting through their friends' lists to see whether somebody on one of those lists had written a favourable review and then deleting it. This does not stop more affluent or well-known authors from having fake reviews of books on Amazon posted, because they have access to a larger group of reviewers.

Please don't get me wrong, fake reviews are not good - they are often called 'sock puppet' reviews. However, many readers become pen-pal friends of their favourite writers these days, and what is wrong with that for Heaven's Sake?

Having said that, Amazon is quite happy to let Trolls leave ten-word shyte reviews without ever having proved that they have read the book (by having purchased it - called 'a verified purchase review').

No, they're fine!

But why are they? I don't understand…

The current Reviews of Books on Amazon policy stinks because it favours famous authors with representation in the form of an agent or and publisher, so it should be changed, but that is unlikely... just look at how Amazon rewards their top Kindle Unlimited authors with tens of thousands of dollars in bonuses leaving most people with an income under $20.

Another problem with reviews concern series. ONE woman didn't like ONE book in a 24-part series but her review is attached to all of those books!

Is that mind-blowingly bonkers or what!

The other issue that they fall down on is taxation. Amazon is the only on-line company that I know of that makes the vendor, writer, in my case, work out the tax and add it to the cost of the item, book, for each country the item is sold in!

This is Stone-age lunacy!

I do all my own work myself, and am expected to work out the various taxes for fifteen countries for each of my 140 books?!

Aren't repetitive mundane tasks what computers are supposed to be good at?

Put it this way: Amazon is by far the biggest on-line retailer of books, but it is the only retailer who forces its authors (and every other vendor) to do this.

I think that the CEO of Amazon should pack it in and grow sweetcorn. Let them head-hunt someone who really knows about taxation and fairness.

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All the best.

Owen

Podcast: Reviews of Books on Amazon