The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft agley.

I expected to be on a train to Berlin Hauptbahnhof, family in tow, right about now; this to be swiftly followed by four days of swanning around the capital of Germany, visiting museums, eating in nice restaurants, seeing friends and doing all the usual tourist stuff. Instead I am staring at the screen of the monitor in my office in the (admittedly delightful) city of Prague musing on the vagaries of life.

How did it come down to this? Yesterday, Nurgle struck down my son Dan with some sort of horrible gastric lurgie. It’s nothing life-threatening but it requires bed rest and a lack of travel. I am glad it was nothing worse. And it does mean I have more opportunities to work this week (oh goodie!) and a chance to actually write this, my regular scheduled Wednesday blog post.

The oh goodie was not entirely ironic. I enjoy my work, the little I do of it, but I can’t help but feel somewhat let down. I feel worse for my wife. This was part of her precious store of holidays (like most people, she has a limited number of days off and has to book them long in advance) and she was really looking forward to this trip. And I feel bad for Dan because he has never been to Berlin before and was excited by the prospect and now he is stuck in bed. Enough whining! Let’s talk about something else.

I’ve reduced the price of Death’s Angels by a couple of bucks. This is an experiment based around the not entirely irrational premise that if I cut the price of the first book of the series more people might buy it and thus purchase succeeding volumes. Currently the Terrarch Chronicles is limited to two books but over the next month that will change as The Queen’s Assassin and Burning Shadows are released.

I am curious to see what, if any, effect this has on sales. There is a huge debate about pricing in the indie epub community. The great thing about epub is you can test the theories empirically with very little effort (a good thing too, otherwise I would not do it). I’ll give it a month and if things work out I’ll keep Death’s Angels at the new price. If there’s little or no change in sales, I’ll put the price back up.

Anyway, that’s the plan. We shall have to wait and see if the powers of Chaos intervene.