Is the blue tick worth it?

 

Twitter has changed. I still think the rebranding as X is silly. This is not least because it makes it very difficult to search on Google for information about Twitter. The words Tweet and Retweet have entered the language. It is perverse to rename them Post and Repost.

But for someone like me who writes regularly and hopes to get readers, Twitter/X is still all there is. I share my articles regularly on Facebook. They get listed on Google, but Twitter provides me with much of my traffic.

It was therefore with some dismay that I began to find the number of my readers in decline. These things tend to go up and down a bit depending on events. During the initial stages of the Sturgeon scandal lots of people wanted to read about it. Then it all went quiet. But this was different.

I reached out to people explaining the situation. I added a donate button. I am so grateful to everyone who has contributed. I was struggling a bit in August with motivation. Why get up early to write another article if it didn’t get the readers I was used to? I began to think that I was doing something wrong. But I got a huge response from readers, and this continues. Thank you so much. It gave me a boost when I needed it.

But still something felt wrong on Twitter. People told me they no longer saw my articles or didn’t even saw me at all. I asked for people’s experience, and many agreed the problem was my lack of a blue tick.

I was initially reluctant to get a blue tick. It felt like a con. For years I had used Twitter without one. Why suddenly did I need one?

Unfortunately, I am forced to conclude that a blue tick is indeed necessary. If you don’t have one you are forced to fight Twitter to get any attention. The algorithm clearly disadvantages those without blue ticks. It doesn’t make Twitter impossible, but it makes it much harder to gain followers and views.

My experience is this. I subscribed to Twitter and a few days later I was given my blue tick. Immediately I gained lots of followers and my tweets gained much more attention. The page views for my site increased also.

There are a few added extras when you get your blue tick. The first thing noticeable is that there is a timer each time you tweet. It gives you the chance to review what you have written. To be honest I find this an annoyance. Next there is the chance to edit a tweet after it has been sent. I find this very useful. I make lots of typos and here is a chance to fix them. I can see how people might abuse the edit feature. You could get people to retweet one thing only to turn it into something else. But I think anyone who did this would lose followers fast.

It is also possible to write much longer tweets. If you approach the normal limit, you are given the opportunity of writing anything up to 10,000 characters, which would be about 2000 words. I could in theory put my whole article in a tweet. But I don’t think a tweet is the ideal place to read an article and it would rather defeat the purpose of getting people to my site. In general, I think long tweets counterproductive. So, I never use this feature.

But the thing that makes the blue tick worth while for me is the opportunity to allow people to subscribe and the opportunity to share Twitter revenue. The second of these has already repaid my subscription.

To be eligible for Ads Revenue Sharing, you need to have a blue tick, you need at least 500 followers, and you need to “Have at least 5M impressions on your posts within the last 3 months” The way you can find out if you do is to go to Twitter analytics.

The added features that you get from the blue tick are frankly not worth it. But if you want to build a following on Twitter, I think a blue tick is essential. If you are happy with a few followers and just want to interact with others I wouldn’t bother getting the blue tick. If you have 5 million impressions in three months, then it is probably worth applying for a blue tick as an experiment. See how much you get back. Then make a calculation of whether it is worth it. It is cheaper to subscribe to Twitter for a year, but I would only pay one month’s subscription to begin with as you are not guaranteed to get a blue tick even if you pay.

The number of my readers has increased since I got my blue tick. My number of followers has gone up hugely. It’s the difference between walking through a bog and walking on dry land.

But I still rely on each and everyone of you to retweet, make comments and above all read the articles. There is only me. I continually need your help to get the message across. The blue tick helps, but each of you helps more.

If you liked this article, then cross my PayPal with silver and soon there will be a new one. See below.

Too little content

I was still a student when the Internet started, or at least when it started to be available to ordinary people, but I never used it. I didn’t know how to send an email and anyway I had no address to send to send it to. I didn’t know how to search, because I didn’t know what a browser or a search engine was. So I left it all alone thinking it was something for the computer scientists. I sent letters by post and put messages in the college pigeon hole.

It was only sometime later, I don’t know quite how, that I discovered dial up modems that monopolised the phone line. I learned that I could buy silent movie DVDs from America using Amazon. A bit later I set my homepage to Google, joined blogger and sold my soul to Twitter.

It’s far too early to judge these things. We are in 1460. It’s twenty or thirty years since Gutenberg started printing. The Reformation will soon come and also the Enlightenment, but there are not that many signs yet that everything is about to be overturned. But it’s already happening.

I haven’t bought a book from a physical bookshop for maybe ten years. I tend to buy out of print fiction, books in Russian or the sort of non-fiction that I’m unlikely to find in Aberdeen. So I just stopped looking. Amazon can get me almost anything I want, but what happens when all the city centres close down?

I have hundreds of friends on facebook, but I haven’t met one of them. I have more than ten thousand followers on Twitter, but I can imagine a future quite easily where I spend most evenings alone.

People sit on the bus scrolling on their mobile phones writing and reading trivia. Students no longer read books, but rather skim their lap tops scanning the lecture notes they’ve been given divided up neatly with bullet points in large print. Their eyes flit between their devices trying somehow to keep up with the ever changing information. Nothing is missed, but is anything more than something fleeting?

Mental health problems increase as we become addicted to a technology that doesn’t satisfy as we lose all sense of what we seek. Meanwhile those who control the technology we depend on are distant, enormous and impossible to contact.  

 Have you ever tried to contact Twitter? I had to a little while ago. Suddenly what I had done on thousands of occasions I could no longer do. A message appeared when I tried to share a link from my blog. No matter what I tried, I could no longer share. Someone, somewhere, or perhaps it was merely a computer programme, had decided that my site was spam. Who knows why?

It was quite literally impossible for me to reach a human being. All I got were forms to fill in. They always gave the same answer and carefully explained that we can’t deal with individual inquiries.

So I gave up and decided to get a new address. After quite a lot of difficulty I set up a new domain. My site is exactly the same. It’s still blogger, but I have a new address linking to it. But suddenly my Google Adsense ads no longer worked. It’s not that big a deal, but it’s an annoyance.

I fiddled around with things as best I could and then filled in a form on Adsense letting them know my new address. Google in their wisdom replied back that I have “Too little content”.

I have exactly the same content as I did before, except I now have a few more articles. The site is the same site. It’s Google own blogger site, which they approved for ads some years ago. The only thing that has changed is the address and that not by much.

I go to the Adsense help section. I get a trouble shooter that takes me nowhere. I get a form where no-one answers my query, but I never get a human being who can answer how three hundred plus original articles some of them very long indeed can amount to too little content.

I am grateful to Twitter and to Google. They have enabled me to reach more readers than I could ever have dreamed of reaching, but then why do I feel like Kafka stuck in Mitteleuropean bureaucracy where all is arbitrary, where some Austro-Hungarian functionary censors because of a whim and where you never quite know what you are on trial for?

Ups and downs

It takes a long time to build a site. I’ve been writing on my present site since around 2012. I’ve written over 300 articles. Each one usually takes between two and three hours to write. Sometimes it comes easily, sometimes it doesn’t. Some things that I spend quite a bit of time on I decide to discard. I try always to say something original. There is simply no point repeating what you read in the papers.

Why write at all? I frequently ask myself this question. My main motivation is that I built my site from nothing. For the first year or two almost no-one read what I wrote. But gradually I built a site which was first read by thousands and then by tens of thousands. More people have read my articles here than anything else I have ever wrote. That’s quite something.

But after years of effort suddenly I find I can’t share my articles on Twitter. I have a number of ways of sharing. I share on Facebook. I share on Google Plus, I share on the Daily Globe site every Monday. Sometimes what I write is good enough to appear on Think Scotland. But Twitter is absolutely crucial to building the momentum that sometimes means one of my articles gets a lot of readers.

I have no idea why I can’t share links from my site on Twitter. It may simply be chance. I have written to Twitter using the following link:

https://help.twitter.com/forms/spam

Perhaps others could do the same on my behalf. If there are enough voices, it might make a difference.

My whole motivation comes from writing for my own site.  I’m always happy to share with anyone so long as it doesn’t involve too much work for me, but my goal for a long time has been to reach one million readers. That may not seem much to some, but it is a lot to me. So I don’t want to move to another site. I want to keep my own site.

Here is what I plan to do. I have a new Blogger site. I am going to use it to show the link to my site. That will be all that it will show. So anyone clicking on a Twitter link will only have to click twice to get to my site. Likewise if they wish to share one of my articles, which by the way is massively helpful, all they will have to do is to use the Wordpress link in their Tweet.

There are a few more things that might help. You might consider friending me on facebook.

https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100009547098705

I post all of my blogs there.

You can also consider following me on Google plus

https://plus.google.com/+EffieDeans

Finally do please follow me on Twitter. I’m sorry I don’t always follow back. It can sometimes be difficult to distinguish between genuine followers and spam ones. But I will try to follow back more.

The key to building an audience for an article is the comment Tweets and Retweets from readers. Without them I am writing to myself.

I have been trying to take my site in a different direction. I can’t write about Scottish nationalism every week. Besides I think sometimes we help the SNP if we spend too much time analysing there latest reasoning for why it would be a good idea to partition Britain. We know their real reason.  

What I am trying to do is to develop a form of politics that lacks a voice in Scotland. I’m Pro Brexit, Pro UK. I would like lower taxes and for public spending to form a lower share of GDP. I am sceptical about much of what the Left has been up to in the past thirty years not just in terms of politics, but in terms of Western culture in general.  I am fairly socially conservative and moderately Christian. I think it is important that the UK Government takes control of our borders so that we can control who arrives here and who can fish in our seas. But I think it is vital that we are kind to everyone who lives in Britain and that we treat everyone who lives here as equally British. If conservatism is to succeed we have to be attractive and we will never be attractive by being nasty about other people.

My hope is that there will not be another independence referendum. But sites like mine may well be useful in the future. This is why I intend to keep the site ticking over with articles about matters other than Scottish politics. We don’t know what the future will bring. I am optimistic. The key is to get the UK out of the EU as completely as possible and then deprive the SNP of their independence supporting majority in the Scottish Parliament. If we can do both of these things, we will be more or less safe. Until then we must be vigilant.

The biggest flaw in the Pro UK mind-set is that while the Nats beaver away and go on marches and pay their charlatans to write about secret oil-fields, we go to sleep as soon as we begin to feel a bit safer.  

What I write is frequently controversial. Sometimes I set out deliberately to provoke. I want to tackle difficult topics using reason, but also by using my ideas about morality and philosophy in general. I like to mock things that I find ridiculous, but I don’t want to be unkind to anyone. There are good people who support Scottish independence and good people who support every mainstream UK political party.     

I hope that it wasn’t a Scottish nationalist tried to prevent me Tweeting my articles. I find some of these people to be very angry indeed and a little bit desperate. It’s worthy of pity and not much more than that.

So I will keep writing so long as enough people keep reading. I may take a break from time to time. Writing can be tiring. Share what I write as much as you can. Tell friends. Post on forums. Tweet and Retweet.

There aren’t that many Pro UK writers in Scotland. We all have our talents and our flaws. We are all needed. Someone really should tell Twitter that it can’t simply prevent me sharing my site without realising that it might have a potential consequence. What if there were ever to be another independence referendum and all it took was for one Scottish nationalist to complain to Twitter about my site or someone else’s? There is an important issue of impartiality at stake.

Failing to take No for an answer

One of the fundamental rules of human behaviour is that you must sometimes accept that the answer is No. Unrequited love is one of the great themes of literature. I think it is nearly always acceptable for a single person to express interest in another single person so long as it is done politely and in a suitable setting. Of course, trying to chat up strangers on a train may not go down too well. But if there is a social situation where there is some degree of interaction, it can hardly be wrong for someone to suggest that they find the other person attractive. Because we’re British we find these situations intensely embarrassing. Still at some point both men and women have to find a way to express interest in each other or else remain single. What happens if the response to the inquiry isn’t exactly positive? My answer to even the hint of a rebuff would be to run a mile, but I accept a degree of persistence can be acceptable. We know from literature, (e.g. Pride and Prejudice) that a marriage can result from a relatively disastrous first meeting. It’s alright to continue to express interest at least for a while. However, when someone says finally and definitely that they are not interested, it is best to take No for an answer. If I continue to pursue the person who has rejected my advances, I’m liable to get myself into trouble. If I won’t leave them alone and continue to press them for a relationship, I will be guilty of sexual harassment. If I follow them and try to find out about their life, where they work, where they live, who they are with, I will be guilty of stalking.

I’ve learned a lot about life online in the last two or three years. One of the things I’ve learned is that the rules of ordinary life do not apply.  People who are without doubt decent in everyday life are willing to act completely out of character while on twitter. When was the last time you swore at a complete stranger in the street? If you were discussing something with acquaintances in a pub, would you call them complete [expletive deleted] idiots? On the whole, the people I meet on the street are polite. They queue for the bus and observe the normal rules of how to interact with strangers. Online however, it sometimes feels like the Wild West.

Politics is never going to be completely genteel. People have strongly held views and it’s perfectly fine that debate is robust. Everyone has used insulting language about political opponents. When I write or tweet I accept that people have a right to disagree with me. I have a comment section on my blog and frequently discuss matters with opponents. As I remain reasonably neutral with regard to UK party politics, the people most likely to disagree with me are SNP/Yes voters.  I try to engage with opponents who choose to interact with me.  I enjoy debate and anyway what’s the point of politics if you can’t debate with those who disagree? If someone is sensible and polite, I will usually talk to them for a while. If someone starts off with insults or swear words, I’ll just ignore them. There are occasions however, when someone I’ve interacted with for a while becomes simply too annoying. Over the summer I ended up at times being overwhelmed with nationalists who kept saying the same old things over and over again. I found I simply couldn’t endure having to repeat the same argument ad infinitum. Sometimes also someone would cross a line and say something I found to be unacceptable. These people I began to either mute or block on twitter. It didn’t mean I necessarily thought they were bad people, just that I couldn’t face seeing them anymore in my timeline.

Some people block me on twitter, though it is completely pointless. I rarely if ever start a conversation with opponents. Certainly if I knew someone had blocked me, I wouldn’t go anywhere near their account again. Such people have in effect said they no longer wish to talk to me, so it’s only polite not to attempt to talk to them. Most people I block behave in this way too.  They leave me alone. There are some however, who simply won’t take No for an answer. Although I no longer see their tweets their names still appear in my timeline when they interact with people I follow.  It’s like listening to one end of a telephone and I can tell from my friends’ comments that these people continue to be abusive.  It would really help if people blocked or at least ignored them too. I peek sometimes at what is being said and it’s not a pretty sight. I don’t particularly mind insults. But when someone relentlessly continues to attack me personally months after I’ve blocked them, I begin to wonder about the kind of person who would do that. Obviously it’s a person who won’t take no for an answer. Even when you’ve said you don’t want to interact with them (what else after all is a block?) they don’t accept that but keep on behaving in the same way as before. This is the equivalent of the harassment I mentioned earlier. The trouble is that once someone begins to fail to take No for an answer, this sort of behaviour escalates. Soon they think it’s OK to metaphorically go through your bins. They go hunting for information at your place of work and try to find out where you live. This is clearly the same as the stalking I mentioned earlier. 

What is responsible for this behaviour? Partly it’s the fact that trolls cannot see their victims. It’s rather like dropping bombs from an aircraft. No-one could face doing it if they saw what happened at the other end. Trolls don’t see the damage they can do to someone. They don’t know whether their victim might be struggling in some way. They don’t see the victim and so they don’t realise the consequences of their actions. We’ve all said stupid things on twitter, but we should all always be aware that there is a human being on the end of our insults. Who knows what damage I could do if I use my words to wound or humiliate. Our lack of kindness to those strangers we meet online may have unknown consequences. Alternatively small acts of kindness may help someone who is going through a tough time. If you believe that politics is about making Scotland better, why not start by making the little corner of Scotland where you live more pleasant. This also includes the online corner.

I’ve always held the view that politics should reflect everyday life. What I believe politically should be reflected in my everyday actions. Of course, government has a role, but if you want to live in a kinder, fairer society, start by being kinder and fairer yourself.  I can’t help thinking that one explanation for the persistence of trolls is that they have been told by the people they admire most that it is quite all right to not to take No for an answer. If it’s fine on a national level not to accept the will of the people in Scotland who said No, then it naturally makes it easier for someone to consider it acceptable to refuse to take No for an answer when an opponent like me blocks them. A tiny number of nationalists behave in this way, but the political policy of failing to take No for an answer has ordinary life consequences. The SNP decided that No did not mean No. Some of their followers will consciously or unconsciously think that this means that they don’t have to take No for an answer online. Others may likewise refuse to take No for an answer offline. Just like the plane dropping bombs the SNP cannot see the damage that they are doing. Their failure to take No for an answer has poisoned this country. It’s like we’re all still stuck in some sort of eternal recurrence. We’re stuck on the 18th of September. There’s continual low level tension, because no-one knows what will happen next to our country. We, who campaigned so hard to achieve a decisive No victory, find our victory under assault every day from those who refuse to take No for an answer. We were not even really allowed to enjoy our victory for more than a few days before the attacks began. The SNP have stirred up our fellow Scots to such a pitch that it seems they will stop at nothing to get what they want. My No vote  counts for nothing in the face of this assault. The No side of Scotland feels like a village awaiting the arrival of Viking berserkers.

When we have elections we have to wait a certain number of years before competing again.  If I don’t get the government of my choice in May I’ll have to accept the result for five years. A referendum is different from a General Election. It will be held much less frequently. It is this that distinguishes a referendum from an ordinary election. For this reason, if we have another referendum on the EU after 42 years and UKIP loses, it would be morally disgraceful and antidemocratic if they continued to campaign for that goal. But the Kippers know this. They accept that they only have one chance. They are democrats.  

Trying to overthrow the result of an election is undemocratic, but so too is trying to overthrow the result of a referendum. This violates the norms of democratic behaviour. When people act in this fashion it angers me. It makes me fight still harder against such immorality. The failure to accept that No means No, is deeply offensive.  This is the case politically and personally, online and offline. It is as morally culpable as the troll, who is blocked who continues to insult, who continues to stalk.

If you like my writing, please follow the link to my book Scarlet on the Horizon. The first five chapters can be read as a preview.

The social media campaign must start now

When I started at my college, there was one telephone in a glass case that I used once a week or so to call my parents. The easiest way to contact someone else was to leave a message in their pigeon hole. If I wanted to meet a friend from Oxford I’d write a letter saying we should meet outside the British Museum at ten o’clock on Wednesday. There were no last minute texts saying I’m going to be late. You turned up on time.

Much about the modern world still seems strange to me. I have a mobile phone, but it’s in my bag switched off. I didn’t have a Facebook, or Twitter account until the Scottish independence campaign began. I learned by doing. I’m still learning.

Back in 2012, or a little earlier, I began to really worry about the independence referendum. I started commenting on some of the articles in the Daily Telegraph. I tried various ways of writing, but it didn’t matter what I did. These comment threads were already dominated by nationalists. Everywhere I went was the same. Someone would write an article and within a very short time word would go out and the whole page would be dominated by independence supporters. This is what worried me. Where were our guys? The nationalists had a never ending supply of people ready to fight online. While for the most part we got on with our lives as if there were no threat to our country.

I started writing blogs, but didn’t really understand what I was doing. Almost literally no-one read what I was writing. My reader statistics were not significant. It turned out sometime later that Google wasn’t even aware of my existence. So I learned that lesson and began reading up on what was necessary to promote my writing. I was reluctant to join Twitter. Like everyone else I said something like “How can you write anything significant in 140 characters?” I thought Facebook was for teenagers. I didn’t really get social media. I still don’t.

For the first year or so on Twitter, I would only tweet about my blog. I had about 100 followers. The number of people who read what I wrote depended quite literally on whether someone with a lot of followers retweeted me or not. I get a bit embarrassed being pushy so I set myself a sort of rule. I would tweet about my blog maybe four times. If people retweeted, I would get a hundred or so readers, if they didn’t, I’d get next to none. It’s frustrating writing and not being read. It takes a lot of effort to write a blog every week. The only thing that makes it worthwhile is that other people take the trouble to read. I learned to be so grateful to the people who did retweet me. I received encouragement too. People were kind enough to leave comments or tweet about my blog unasked. I learned patience too. When you write, you must build an audience. If you write well, people will come back to read again. Some of my early blogs were ill-thought out and poorly written. I learned to write better. Now that I’m moving into writing fiction I’m still learning. That’s what’s great about writing, trying to get across ideas clearly in such a way that people want to continue reading.

With a few months to go until the referendum I changed tactics. I still wrote blogs, but I tweeted much, much more. There’s a technique for writing on Twitter. There are tweets that work and there are those that don’t. It really helped my style to be limited to these little aphorisms. As the campaign grew in intensity I gained followers just as I began to follow more. Anyone sensible who retweets or comments gets a follow. Once I got to two or three thousand followers I found it impossible to read more than a random fraction of tweets. Now I only really read my timeline. What I learned was don’t get into long futile arguments with people who won’t change their mind. Now I respond once or twice and move on. Long threads with strings of names and hardly any room to comment are without purpose.

I’m still learning about social media and blogging, but I know we have to do things better. I honestly thought that the campaign would end one way or the other in September, but it hasn’t. We have another fight on our hands. It may be that this fight will last all of our lives. The Smith Commission could help things, especially if devolution is made more equal across the UK. On the other hand it may make matters worse. The nationalists just want to make little steps towards independence. Are we helping them or hindering them? Only time will tell. There’s nothing wrong with devolution as long as it is done coherently and as long as there is equally a movement to unify the country. Politicians should be accountable and the best way to make them so is to bring them as close to local people as possible. Above all we must be able to kick out those who do a poor job, which can only happen if we cease voting tribally. What we know already though is that the nationalists will only ever be happy with independence. Smith will not appease them. When did appeasement ever work? Where does that leave us? It leaves us with a task. We have to start campaigning again and we have to mobilise the pro UK majority. There is a majority.  Never forget we won in September.

There is only one sensible tactic for No voters at the General Election. Like everyone I have my own views about party politics, but it’s far, far more important to me that Scotland remains in the UK than that either Labour or the Conservatives form the next UK government.  The General election matters, but what is five years of a government I disagree with compared to losing my country? The only way we can limit the number of SNP seats is by working together just as we did during the independence campaign. Whichever party has the best chance of defeating the SNP in any particular constituency must have the support of all No voters. The task however is to determine this accurately, not simply to rely on the last General election. If we do this cleverly we can use our 55.3% majority to defeat the SNP’s 44.7% minority. In theory this could limit them to seats in Glasgow and Dundee. Of course this will not happen. But a tactical voting campaign will limit the number of seats the SNP gain.  It will also maximise the support for Labour, the Lib Dems and the Conservatives. It’s in everyone’s interest for Better together to continue informally cooperating. Don’t let anyone tell you this sort of campaign is illegitimate. After all previously we ganged up on the Tories. But they never tried to break up my country. All we are doing is making the SNP the new nasty party.

How do we get the message across? By social media of course. But we must do it better. In war it is important to learn from what your enemy does well. In every war there are new tactics, e.g. Blitzkrieg. When you imitate them it hardly means you are expressing support for the enemy. Our opponents do social media much better than we do. Think of Wings and Bela. Here are two sites where nationalists are able to gather together, write and comment. Of course we do not agree with what is written in these sites, it is largely propaganda, nor indeed with the people who write them, but an astonishing number of independence supporters read these blogs. Over time I have built a pretty reasonable audience, but it is as nothing compared to the number of readers Wings gets.

The problem goes back to the beginning. The nationalists care more than we do. They were campaigning in huge numbers when there were hardly any Pro UK people online. After the referendum our supporters relaxed and said job well done. They went back to their lives and became indifferent again. The nationalists kept on fighting. How many UK supporters would come to a rally organised to protect the Union? We’d be lucky to get 100. They can get 10,000 at the drop of a hat. How many of us would turn up for a march or a demonstration? Almost none. They just need to send a message on social media and they can get as many as they want. If Wings wants to publish a little book he just has to ask and the money pours in. They are more committed than we are. It’s for this reason that they have grown in strength despite defeat, while we have weakened.

There are some excellent pro UK blogs, but wouldn’t it be great if we were all gathered together in one place and it was properly promoted? I would certainly contribute. I would set one up, but I simply lack the skills to do so. I can’t even send a text message. I suspect anyway that if such a site were going to happen, it would already have happened. But what we can do is share what we write much more than we do. It costs nothing to retweet. By all means favourite, but only retweets will build an audience. It also costs nothing to tell someone else on social media about an article you’ve seen. We must be generous in the way we support each other. That’s not to say we are always aware. Twitter passes in a flash. I’m sure there are good blogs that I don’t know about. Please share with me and I’ll tweet about them all I can.

The next few months are crucial. The SNP had momentum with two weeks to go before the referendum, but we turned it around. We turned it around by ordinary people making an extraordinary effort and by getting our message across to people who didn’t care about politics. We must overcome that indifference once again and we must get through to the same people who turned out in their droves to save the UK. I am so grateful for the support I have received. Without you I would still be writing only for myself. Your retweets made all the difference. Sharing is the way we can turn things around. 

If you like my writing, please follow the link to my book Scarlet on the Horizon. The first five chapters can be read as a preview.