‘I repeatedly failed to win any awards’: my doomed career as a North Korean novelist
No, that’s not me. But this next is. I was once offered a job sorting out the memoirs of Kim Il Sung. When I was in Moscow. They had an “English” translation and wanted it turned into an English translation. They knew I was doing some writing back then. So, would I take on the job?
“Maybe. How much?”
“$100”.
“$100 per what?”
“$100 for the book, about a thousand pages”.
“Err, no.”
You should have referred them to Captain Potato who would probably have taken the gig for the Joy of the Task.
Become the first novelist in North Sentinel Island.
PS – how come North Sentinel Island (GDP: some mussels) was able to Stop The Boats, despite having no technology or written laws, but Rishi Sunak and the entire British state (GDP: loads of mussels) “can’t”.
Exile wannabe writer foolishly returns to totalitarian dictatorship. Complains bitterly. Writes about it in the Guardian.
There you go. 16 words.
We don’t kill and eat the foreigners Steve.
Wicked Islamophobes like me think they taste lousy.
I am confused. Socialists are constantly telling me I should give all my income to the State, and continue to work for the Joy of Working.
How come there is not a single socialist in the whole of Socialdoom who wants to take on this task for free? Does “all your money are belong to everyone” actually mean “all your money are belong to us”? That some are exempted from the obligation to work for nothing? How could it be?
Boganboy – I don’t think the Sentinelese eat strangers, they just leave them on the beach filled with souvenir arrows.
Remember Indiana Jones used to run away from little guys like that all the time? I’d keep the seaplane engine running tho.
Steve
Sounds like a shocking waste of good food to me.
Or is this just my programming by the constant Green propaganda speaking??
Copy editors are often very hardworking, but the one for my last book buggered up the punctuation to make it ‘American’, and changed ‘pernickety’ to ‘persnickety’, which really got my goat. Also got the hyphenation wrong. Drove me mad.
Even so, I hope she was paid reasonably.
Boganboy – I’m wondering if we could defeat North Sentinel Island in a war:
The British military—the leading U.S. military ally and Europe’s biggest defense spender—has only around 150 deployable tanks and perhaps a dozen serviceable long-range artillery pieces. So bare was the cupboard that last year the British military considered sourcing multiple rocket launchers from museums to upgrade and donate to Ukraine, an idea that was dropped.
Seems the answer is “no”. £50Bn a year for the military equivalent of a cardboard cutout of a policeman.
@Excavator Man – I sent a manuscript out to a beta reader and it came back full of random apostrophes.
– I’m wondering if we could defeat North Sentinel Island in a war
We’d have to get past you and Tucker and Colonel MacGregor telling everyone we can’t win, it’s all our fault and we shouldn’t listen to the neocon-military-industrial-nuland-yutani-complex.
Steve,
It’s always been shit. There’s some good, brave lads in uniform but a lot of the military is just like the rest of the inefficient state. I never understood why troops buying their own body armour in Afghanistan wasn’t considered a scandal.
PJF – We’d have to get past you and Tucker and Colonel MacGregor telling everyone we can’t win, it’s all our fault and we shouldn’t listen to the neocon-military-industrial-nuland-yutani-complex.
Well, nobody likes the guy that told you so.
But I thought I told ya how to win. And so did you, and many other Blokes over many years.
Basically, see all that Blairite, weirdo, globalist, eco-fraud, open borders, sniggering posh twat Blobby nonsense that’s killing our country?
Yarp, stop doing that. Frack, onshore and invest in an armed forces that prioritises lethality over LGBTQ+ hijabis. All the stuff the Gammon have been saying since about 1973.
An amazing thing has happened: the collective West, which has been the dominant global military force for 500 years, has atrophied.
France, the next biggest spender, has fewer than 90 heavy artillery pieces, equivalent to what Russia loses roughly every month on the Ukraine battlefield. Denmark has no heavy artillery, submarines or air-defense systems. Germany’s army has enough ammunition for two days of battle.
…
The European Union looks unlikely to keep a promise to supply a million desperately needed artillery shells to Kyiv by this spring, achieving only around a third of that so far. North Korea, an impoverished dictatorship with a population of 25 million, has shipped over a million shells to Russia in the same period
…
Germany’s army, which at the end of the Cold War had half a million men in West Germany and another 300,000 in East Germany, now has 180,000 personnel. West Germany alone had more than 7,000 battle tanks by the 1980s; reunified Germany now has 200, only half of which are likely operational, according to government officials. The country’s industry can make only about three tanks a month, these officials said.
…
Today, Russia, China and India are all ranked as more potent military powers than the U.K., the highest rated European military, while South Korea, Pakistan and Japan are ranked above France, the second-highest rated European power, according to Global Firepower, a website that uses public data to publish an annual ranking of military strength.
Western Bloke – Yarp, run by the MoD, for the MoD. And those senior orifices who got fantastic jobs with GD after completely fucking up (££££££) the Ajax procurement.
Being an old-fashioned sort of guy Steve (you guessed!!!!!), I naturally believe that Wug’s approach when he was fighting Ug’s mob was the best. That is kill the lot.
It thus follows that all modern Western wars should be the same, simply turn the place into a desert of radioactive glass. If heroic guerillas creep across the border, you turn their country into a desert of radioactive glass as well.
But alas the commie/traitor/do-gooder/greenie scum have invented a really stupid idea – winning their hearts and minds. Now you know perfectly well that other people just don’t agree with you. They have the temerity to think that their opinions are worthy of some sort of consideration. Which is nonsense. So the only thing to do is to kill them all.
And until we go back to this good old-fashioned method, we’re going to lose wars.