I Had A Dream (Pradski's Adventures In The Russian Revolution) by A.N.Muggins

(featuring Alfred Muggins’ imaginary alter ego in the Russian Revolution. An imaginary and rather exaggerated scenario – coming from one of A.Muggins’ many dreams)

     Pradski meets Santa Claus in a beautiful white Russian costume! Pradski is a committed Bolshevik, who was a Siberian wandering monk before the Revolution, but he decided he had better modernise very quickly and become a committed Bolshevik. He liberated peasants and factory workers from their masters, but managed to do all this by persuasion, without killing anyone! He became Lenin’s best friend and was promoted before Stalin could prevent his rise.

    He brought peace and love to Russia, and even managed to persuade the western capitalists to stop trying to destabilise the communist paradise! He kept one step ahead of Stalin, who never actually managed to murder him, and he became President of the Soviet Union instead!

    He hoped it would become a bestseller one day, but as it was impossible for someone who was not a famous or popular personality to get a book published without paying for it themselves, and even then you couldn’t possibly make it famous enough to actually sell more than a few copies!

     You had to lose a few friends to become a writer, and particularly a novelist, because there just wasn’t time to socialise if you wanted to do a reasonable quantity of work. But without friends how could you sell your book to anyone? It was a contradiction, like many others, that could just not be solved. There had been successful authors in the past, quite a few, but now since the invention of the internet not many people were reading actual books any more it seemed. Well not ordinary books by the ordinary mass of writers. People could read all they wanted for free on the internet, but still didn’t choose to in large numbers, because they were too busy :-

1. Working.

2. Doing Facebook and Twitter with their seductive and comical memes, and other social media, which he hardly knew anything about because he spent too much time writing (and listening to music) and watching his wife’s favourite dramas and documentaries, (including anything about Henry and his six wives and the Tudors, and the Wars Of The Roses in particular), and Coronation Street too as well!

3. Or they were too busy writing themselves, which an awful lot of them were doing, because they found it was an enjoyable pastime, given the great advances in word processing and posting onto writing sites and Facebook, which could be so easily done, even if not many people could be made or encouraged to read them.