Category Archives: Romance Writing

With A Cast of 50,000 – The Valley Of The Trolls

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I’m a troll

We’ve been together for a year now – just you and me. Well, it’s better than drinking alone I guess. One year ago I was certain I knew nothing. Today I know everything there is to know about uncertainty. I had just launched “Knockout” – my genre Romance pulsating with animal lust, lusty animals and International Locations. To some extent I have come in a complete circle. At that distant time I realised that I was saying goodbye to 35 years of serious writing. The slush piles of the Great Gatekeepers had felt the weight of my A4 gravitas. The bin-men of south London had kept pace with my output and the scorn of editors. Employers had failed to appreciate my creative day dreaming. The dog shampoo sales stats from Manchester got lost in the post modernist white thrusting buttocks of yet another dystopian philosophical tract. My writing career had arrived at the genre milestone simply because I was too poor even to starve in the attic. Perhaps – just perhaps, one could actually make some kind of income as a writer?


At first it was all about blogging and networking. That is how we met. The book went out onto all the platforms and we struggled with different formatting and “American” grammar. A few dozen kind souls looked at the blog. Now and then someone bought a book. We were priced at 99 cents. Each sale was like a birth. Now and then a kind soul would enjoy the book and give me a decent review. At that time I was able to write and live in France. I was a humble little mouse, building my literary burrow.


Firstly then the blog. I regard this as something of a success story because the readership has grown without any corporate stunts. The help and support of indie writers has boosted the readership to a total of 2,500 per month. For the first 6 months I set myself the goal of blogging every day.  Although I’m ever popular with Russian males, most of the traffic is random hits from people clicking on photographs. The fact is that the blog has sold very few books.


I arrived in the digital budget hotel with just 2 items of luggage. One was a short story “Sub Prime” and the other a genre “supermarket” book about cops and slobbers. I had decided a few years before to ditch everything of the previous period – i.e. my life. We used to live in a Capitalist system. Now life is Capitalism. Every single thing is commercial. Everything is bottom line. This is a born poor/stay poor world unless you can pull off the deal and get your hook to hold up in the sky. Dear old “Sub Prime” is the last footprint of the way I wanted to write. 


“Knockout” bumped along the bottom all through 2011. It was so far on the sea bed that only flat fish and readers fitted with sonar could detect it.  I believe we were at about number 60,000 in the Amazonian Ocean of a million digital books. This appalling figure means that 900,000 books have no significant sales at all. 

Course of the Amazon

Then came KDP Select. We knew that other writers had gained visibility by offering free books. This was our chance to get a hook up into the blue sky. We hurled it up – and it stuck behind a fast moving cloud. We topped several categories and reached the top 300 of all books. So far we have given away 50,000 books. A success story perhaps? Well – it rather depends on what happened next. 


Our first free run in January 2012 led to a sustained sales period over weeks. People were buying and enjoying the book. Reviewers on the whole were very positive and we were beginning to see some hope of some income after months and months of day and night  promo work through every conceivable media and cyber hang-out. I had also returned to the UK, grateful to get work as a bus driver.  I must also add that my actual book and story writing had stopped. Quite simply the endless jingle jangle of click this and check that has destroyed my inner calm. I tell Gilles that I am going through the Zenopause. 


Our second free run in early March was a similar success with a sustained sales afterglow. I began to notice hits by very negative reviewers as the book went back for sale. I have a policy of not commenting on reviews but surely if you are going to criticise a book – you should have read it properly or indeed, merely have read it to some extent.


Our third free run was in mid April. Clearly things had changed. Now, I’m not much of a musician – but I do have a natural sense of algorithm. Amazon have changed the deal so that you need to do ten times the traffic of free sales to get the same advancement up the sales charts. Visibility means sales. Sales means visibility. Almost the minute we came off the free deal, the negative reviews came in. Perhaps I am paranoid but can you really slam a book on the basis that in “real life” a woman would not risk her career for forbidden love? Come on guys! The book is a light sex infused escapist Romance, not a career development manual. 


So – 50,000 potential readers have the book. On the basis of the last free run we gave away about 5,000 books in order to sell about 50. It is quite clear  that in the current format KDP Select is not for me and I will not do any more free days. I know people only grab the book because it is free, but if I had sold one tenth of those books, I would not be working all day driving a bus – at least for a few months. I also think there is a great difference between the free reader and the person who looks at your book, samples it and then actually buys it. In the long term it is probably counter-productive  to put your book into the hands of people who would never like it or choose it. 


Here is the problem though. During my last free run, I was one of 15,000 free books on that day. There are now so many free books that no one is ever gonna have to buy one again. Soon there will be a plug in external memory for e-readers and all free books will be scooped as they come out. One day our unfortunate children will receive only our digital libraries of unread free books as their inheritance. Well, they won’t have jobs to keep them busy.

Emma at the Oracle

I am not an Amazon hater. They have enabled me to publish at little cost. The lending library feature provides some income, albeit small. All the same, I feel like a supplicant at the feet of the priestess of Apollo as she interprets the gas emissions at the Oracle of Delphi. No one knows what is going on. Each time the oracle pronounces, the mob charges off to the latest Klondike. Each time a Romance novelist writes a blog, the historical imagery becomes more tangled. Soon there will be Amazon soothsayers and experts. Amazon lobbyists will offer special insights. And they will all be right – until the oracle emits gas again.


Oooh – I do go on. Thank you all my lovely readers who have sustained me during the last year. How was it for you? Please dear friends – let me know how you are getting on with KDP Select?  My own future is gonna be a lot more proactive. I want to get to the readers who want to read me and will pay a few cents to do so.


In the teeming millions of creatures being swept down the Amazon to the sea, I will no longer be  a speck in the universe washed onto the shifting sands of broken metaphors. Who said I was a purple crap writer? I really do love you guys out there.


Emma thinx: Don’t big yourself up. Big yourself within.
















Going For Gold

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Heavy Sabre

There are three types of sword used in the sport of fencing. They are the foil, épée and sabre. My readers will probably suspect that I have not done a lot of fencing. However, I am very well acquainted with the noble art of parry and riposte since I used to be the bus driver for a famous public school. One of my missions used to be driving the fencing team around to equally famous public schools so that the young gentlemen could duel with each other.


 Now, as you will know comrades, my sympathies and background are somewhat proletarian. The accents and demeanour of the young blades and their masters seemed almost from a different planet. They exuded wealthy effortless self confidence and played esoteric japes in Latin with their peers and instructors. I always felt I should have disliked them. In reality they behaved towards me as absolute gentlemen and when food was served they ensured that I was treated equally. When packed lunches were provided, I received exactly the same. When they got off the bus they cleared every item of litter and thanked me for my service. Every time I got home I had to go to my secret naughty drawer and fondle my copy of the communist manifesto just to relieve the tension.

Plus ça change
Olympic Torch
And the point of all this is to announce the arrival of the new Olympic sport of sabre rattling. As the London 2012 games approach on the anti aircraft radar, our News bulletins are filled with accounts of battleships, snipers, commandos, missiles, and socket repelled grenades. In the air helicopters, Euro fighters, Tornado attack jets and AWACs planes will circle and hover over the city. Soldiers in masks practice kidnap and hi jack operations on riverboats. Thousands of extra security staff are being recruited and trained to say “No!” Oooh – it’s come a long way from a few sexy Greek boys doing a bit of running and hurling their shafts. I know all this stuff is necessary but it does bring home to me the actual nature of the world we live in. Like everyone I will be watching our pure boys and girls attempting to defeat the drug fuelled ugly foreigners. Luckily I will be in France and their cameras are programmed to ignore all competitors other than their own. Even the 100 metres is a solo event. We Brits are not like that of course. Please please let us get through the coming ordeal with nothing more than a few dreams, prides and records being broken.

When I wrote “Knockout”, the Olympics were just a TV news item showing a lot of cheering important British folk with glasses of champagne and lots of glum looking foreign important people. It was at that moment that I decided to write an account of the darker aspect of sport and corrupt gambling. I called an old friend at Scotland Yard and asked for some inside info. He asked me if I was free for dinner and what I was doing afterwards. I tried to work on an objective account of serious international crime but in the end everything got kinda mixed up with love and sex. It was much the same story when I came to write the book.

Emma thinx: Is there a gold medal for Nationalism?

Collidescope

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Stepping up to the job

Oh dear – I’ve been a bit peaky you know. Some new virus from outer space has been withering me bronichals if you will excuse the expression. It’s not that I need a pick-me-up, it’s more a case of needing a crane. I knew when I signed up for the gym that it would all come to no good. How many times do you hear that so and so famous sporty sparty athlete has had to pull out of events because they have a sporty sparty virus? Huh – and what type of person do you meet at fitness centres? Yes – it’s sick athletes passing on their bugs. When did you ever hear of anyone pulling out of competition because of chocolate? When did you ever hear of a virus that singled out wine merchants or foie gras manufacturers. I would rest my case but it’s a bit wobbly.

We are not amused. Obama was far more fun than this.

What got me back to the keyboard was of course Her Majesty the Queen. She’s been on the throne for 60 years. Now, what a waste of a career. Anyone who can sit on the same seat year after year with no hope of getting any further should have been a novelist. Today she gave a speech to Parliament and they gave her a stained glass window. Now what sort of gift is that?  You can’t just put it on e-bay  tagged as “unwanted gift”.  Where would you put it?

Schism of prism

The speaker of the House (of Parliament) John Bercow, gave a speech first, welcoming the Queen’s speech. Oh dear – oh no -PM Dave did not like it! Bercow called her “The kaleidoscope Queen”.(Police outside fought with crowds to hold back Freddie Mercury fans). But no – he meant Her Majesty. Obviously he set the wrong tone. The Tower of London is being prepared. Heads will roll.

Queen of Romance

One demi-royal was in fact a novelist. The step-grandmother of Princess Diana was Barbara Cartland who is probably the most successful writer of all time. Her Romances sold at least a billion copies and in her lifetime she published 723 books. I wrote to her about 35 years ago asking for the name of her agent. It is beginning to look like she was too busy to reply.


Now let’s cheer you up. Dear old Oscar has been in an online Arts mag (The Altered Scale) featuring all manner of music, performance and general fusion. I checked out the event and came across a group that are pure sexy grunge dirty blues that absolutely grips me. I wanna write love and sex like this music. The artists are called “Purgatory Hill”. This moooosic howls pure celestial bestial luvstuff.


Emma thinx: If you have to set the tone – avoid the purple concrete.



Bi-Polar Bare

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A while ago a lad on the bus was chatting to me about his girlfriend. The mere fact of having obtained such an asset positively changed his demeanour. Instead of his normal monosyllabic grunt and slouch he became a young gent. His acne receded and was transformed into vocabulary.


About ten days ago he did not come out to board the bus to go home. Unsympathetic teenagers grew restive in my mirror. I cranked up the music but that brought complaints from the headphone wearers. At the last minute he appeared being led by a teacher. His tear stained face was swollen. It was over. Over. Over, with that terrible brick wall finality of a dead hamster in the palm of a young hand and the rest of mortality. The vocabulary acne inversion flipped like the magnetic poles of the planet in history.

Yesterday, they got back together. Compasses started to work again. GPS systems stopped talking backwards. No one should feel insecure. It won’t last.


I’ve been giving away books on Amazon KDP. I am one of the more successful donors of the American literary world. However, in the UK, the natural sense of cool reserve and dissimulation prevents the accepting of gifts from strangers. I have the feeling that if I were to tour in my white Rolls Royce cabriolet throwing bank notes to the crowd, they would run after me handing them back. Probably I would get a ticket for littering. 

blueprint for a question not yet asked

Then the unthinkable happened. I started to sell books. Maybe after all I was a writer. I exchanged my life and personality for  sales figures. Some days I see myself as a pie chart, other days a block graph. Yesterday I had that corporate spreadsheet feeling. Personality and self image issues – surely not!
As I looked out from my window yesterday into the cold clear dusk I saw a tree reflecting the direction of life, albeit very simplified. 


Today sales dipped a little. A reviewer thought I should give up and drive a bus or something. The GPS is talking babble. I think I’m too old for acne. Insecure? Me?




Emma thinx: Whatever you’ve put in someone’s life today – they’re already passing it on.



Biting the bullet

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Mystery headless man in white spotted at crime scene

I diesel droned the bus by the police tape that closed the block of flats and the shopping parade. Regulars might remember my little moan about derelict buildings and the vision of children. Well, the area is closed because of a shooting. Various young men have been arrested and the judicial processes set in train. Gowns and wigs will be televised. Pronouncements will be boomed in posh voices about violence and the protection of  decent society. No one is surprised. Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday are lottery days. This time….this time!!! Such things can happen anywhere I know. Circles are vicious. Cones and spirals can take you up or down. I’ll leave it to you to judge the general direction. 


Now – I’ve spent several months in a dilemma. When your name is Emma that can tear you in two. It’s not that I have not been writing – it is more that I’ve been uncertain as to the direction to go. To be frank – I am under frilled to be a Romance writer. I am a real person with tubes, follicles, on lazy/writing days occasional armpit and leg fur and the beginning of a tummy. Well actually – quite a mature tummy. Maybe it is time to write that gritty Earth moving novel about poverty and greed set against a backdrop of boiling revolution.  A young peasant girl gives her only remaining kidney to save a dying investment banker who once tossed her mother a dollar to buy the baby milk that saved her life.  He falls in love with her but with both her kidneys gone, she dies. Oooh – I’ve told you the story now so there’s no need to bother. By the way – she sold her other kidney to pay off her dying father’s pay day loan and a new winter jacket for the elderly three legged dog they rescued from the burning barricades.


So – I have actually scrapped most things I have been doing. The fact is that I love the escape of Romance and the its ability to blend sex with glamour and true love. Good sexy romance can educate women and men a little too!  (My theory is that if a few of the angry young Kalashnakids had a bit more sex they’d be a bit more mellow).  If you think kids get told it all at school – think again. The facts sure ain’t the whole truth. It’s gonna be Romance with all the sex-joy-love-passion power I can muster. I’ve been writing the story in my head for a while and things might go a bit quiet for a few weeks. 


Now –let’s talk serious bus driving. I am a full bodied Lycra clad righteous planet saving eco green cyclist AND a bus driver. You know, the real problem here is the way we manage traffic. Basically we are savages. I’ve never had any sort of impulse to injure a cyclist but driving long, wide and heavy vehicles in crowded tense situations is difficult and stressful. Big trucks and buses do not mix with bikes! Why do we think they should??? Now I’ve upset the  the cyclists.  Guess I might be the subject of a flatwa. You gotta laugh.


Emma thinx: When in Romance. Do!

Writing the Sex in the Text

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Shall we talk about sex? Oh OK – if you really want me to. I write Romance. Well – love and sex actually. In “Knockout” there is a story but it is a story about a sexy woman going headlong into a passionate sexathon with a beautiful guy. They do it in her bed. She does it all on her own. They do it in his bed, in Paris, several other places and they do it on a boat. They kiss and caress the burning totality of each other’s lips. They adore each other’s skin and musk. She craves the untiring hard knot of his controlling, urgent muscles. He longs for her abandon, surrender and softness They eat highly flavoured food and breathe the garlic of shared ecstasy. They drink champagne and lie naked in the warm open air almost as a sacrifice on the altar of lust. Oooh….if I don’t stop tweaking the knobs I’ll have to jump in a cold bath. And just think – it was me, a middle aged working woman who wrote it.

self portrait

 The basic reason why I write this kinda stuff is that I love it in life and I love it in fantasy. I know it may be a brazen to say that, but it’s true and if I’m honest then in my writing about sex I’m not short changing my readers. When I write a sex scene I am there and willing it on. Actually, it’s writing itself.


There are technical problems in writing about sex. The big one (Oooh steady on) is the line between artistic, pornographic, anatomical, purple and naff. Different generations and cultures have different levels of frankness and taste. In the supermarket today I noted that I could present myself for chlamydia venereal disease testing while I was waiting for a new batch of granary wholemeal bread to reach the shelves. All those intimate swabs quite put me off the idea of a nice buttered crust.  I was reading some supermarket Romance where the young lady presented her sexual arousal by way of her “dampened swath”. That brought me out in a fit of the giggles. I figured if things didn’t gel with the guy at least she could wipe down the kitchen worktops. In another similar epic, the young lady exposed her “creamy crevice” – so far this is the worst image I have ever encountered. Well, at least there is some classy alliteration. Finding the words, the euphemisms and the poetic passion of human juice is not always easy. Just this morning I encountered a curly triangle of love. Well, I suppose if your car broke down you could prop it up in the road to warn other drivers of an obstruction. It’s all about context is it not?

knobs and shafts

When it comes to the male side of the park, obviously a female can only guess and ask a lot of questions. My lover man is never shy. His only complaint is that males only get to ride one wave while  females can stay in surfing all day. – (Hmmm – depends on the quality of the water). Males provide more vocabulary problems. I have a few dislikes – such as swollen manhoods. It always makes me think of those old naval war films where they wear 10 layers of clothing under a duffle coat.. Luckily, my readers are mostly female and factors such as size of hands, width of shoulders and tone of voice can excite more response than shafts, lengths and pulsating needs. For fun I googled “knobs and shafts”. Not quite what I had in mind. With males it’s just so easy to get lost in engineering. 


But here is the core of the issue. People like sex. Even people who do not want actual full contact sex are interested in it. Sex is us. We are born what we are and half the world has the opposite set of bits. 

And then, of course there is love. Oh Love, oh love, love, love. This purest thing, rejoicing in the pollution of its own sense, losing focus so as to see nothing but the other. It is where the ego both asserts its power to give and shrivels in a humility of powerless longing. Our love finds expression and escape in physical sex. Cold sex is what my friend the poet Oscar Sparrow describes as the “gaping gash of loveless love”. Getting this blend right is the work of the humble hack Romance writer. 

“Knockout!” my romance novel on Kindle is FREE on Saturday 28th and Sunday 29th January if you want to check out how I deal with these tender literary parts.

Amazon USA
Amazon UK


Emma thinx: Love me – love my love.







Roboscribe puts her love on the line.

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Production line



It’s coming isn’t it. Just as I get to be a writer, the geeks come up with Roboscribe. Just as I got good enough with a glass of wine and a cleaver to be a TV Masterchef, the genre starts to fade. One Foodmeister gets arrested for stealing cheese and wine and another gets kicked out of his job with Sainsbury’s. Probably the only thing left is to be the first Romantic novelist in outer space. Come to think of it though, there are already plenty of weightless novels.


This little tirade was brought about by a message in my inbox inviting me to buy some software with which to write and perfect my novel. Wow – now all I’m waiting for is a programme to do the typing and print it out. I was a little worried by the typos in the advertising blurb, but perhaps they did not use their own stuff – or worse, maybe it was wrote by a human bean. I will confess that there is a little devil in me that is tempted to spend my £9.99 ($15) and have a go……should I? I have tried working with Mills and Boon/Harlequin editors so I have walked on that wild side without shame……and publication. How did I know they would not run a book where the female heroine drove a double decker bus? One day a multi billionaire gorgeous Italian guy gets on, brushes her cheek with a wad of erotically scented cash and asks to be swept away. She stops her bus, rummages in her locker for her dustpan and brush and tells him with a knowing wink she is the woman if that’s what turns him on….Can you imagine how I felt when I got that rejection letter?


Oh – how terrible it is to be a famous author. This is often the complaint of old school angst and closet writers. Just imagine how ghastly it is to be constantly in touch with your customers! Well, actually NO! As a mere worm in the pantheon of scribbling I love to hear from readers. A couple days ago some folk got in touch and told me they had done a review of my book.  I would like to say thanks with all my heart and to assure the reading world that I just love to chat with them. 


Emma thinx: There’s no formula for love. It’s chemistry Stupid!

Insecure? I’m not sure really.

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Actually I was feeling relatively secure as I sat down to write my blog. Then an 85 mph gust of wind hit a tree just to the right of my office window. Several tons of wood split from the trunk and destroyed my neighbour’s garage and a good portion of the house roof. The rest of the tree now leans towards my very position. Now, I’ve always maintained that any sense of security in this world is misplaced. We are helpless creatures of no account, clinging to our fragile capsule of individual conscious time. As dear old John Keats wrote for his own epitaph “Here lies one whose name was writ in water”.  I’m OK with the water, but I wonder if I could have it 50/50 with a decent brandy? Of course,  John Keats did not have the benefit of the Insecure Writers’ Support Group.  The course of English Literature could have been so very different…


Insecurity as a writer is of course another thing all together. I mean, who is not a writer? Any time I tell someone I’ve written a book I find that they have already written several or believe that they have a host of unwritten brilliant narratives ready to wow the Readerverse. So – who would bother with me?  Um – well – there are always the critics.


When I first launched “Knockout” I came across a lady who offered to review books. Her verdict opened “I knew at once that I would hate this book.” All the same she carried on in what I can only assume was an orgy of masochistic self loathing. “The characters were unrealistic since no Police Inspector would just fall in love with some guy.” She followed it it with the suggestion that “The writer is clearly a foreigner with no idea of England. (I am a Londoner) Names of places in London are used as if it were a guide book.”  The critic then turned to the matter of a restaurant menu which she felt was a poorly designed combination of dishes.  Finally she declared that the character of a Police commander was “unrealistic since such a bombastic character would have been brought up before some kind of employment tribunal”.  I thanked her for her kind efforts but some small part of me wanted to say that it was a Romance where rather larger than life characters behaved rather “Romantically” in a world of unsuitable menus and horrid bosses. I could also have said that the Police Commander was based on someone I knew and if anything, underestimated his odiousness. As a final salvo the lady opined that the choice of the name Freddie for the French/American male hero was a ridiculous pun on a sitcom character called “Freddie the Frog” of whom I had never heard. 


The choice then was whether to accept all her criticisms and not publish or kinda stick to my self belief that, although not high art, it was not that bad. Perhaps some of you guys will let me know.


I think I’m in my 35th year of more or less continuous rejections. I suppose my confidence wavers as I wait for the letter. By now I feel utterly secure in my prediction of the outcome. I know there is a novel from 20 years ago possibly in a slush pile, still out there somewhere. Some rejections have become treasures. A famous poetry editor wrote back to me to say that my work was ghastly but that he loved my covering letter. I felt validated and secure. It was the only time. I have always taken comfort from the notion that all the GREATS were rejected, cut their ears off and ended up in a pauper’s grave. The only problem is that this is not true. 


If I’m being serious I would say that all the years of rejections have never stopped me from trying and have convinced me that I’m unlikely to please any publisher/agent. This realisation is my freedom and I am secure in it. My good friend Oscar Sparrow, the poet, has recorded the supposed world’s worst poem. People get in touch with him just to say they love it. If you wanna hear the sweet sound of heroic failure here is a link. By the way, the “world’s worst” poet Theo Marzials was a huge success in his own life-time!


Emma thinx: The trouble with insecurities is that they tie you down.

Weapons

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There is nothing simple. Love is wonderful. War is heroic. The deeper the love, the more terrible its end. The more terrible the war, the more joyful its end. The machinery of conflict has potency and evokes awe. The salt of tears shed in love spice the soul equally for king and slave.

In London I took a couple of photos and from these arose my thoughts. You will have your own.

Emma thinx: If you can think sensibly of love – you are not in it. 

Cook The Books With A Gastrocrat

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Italy is to be led by a technocrat. Greece has been handed to a technopinion of technocrats. All of this misses the vital point. What is a crat? Also what is the proper collective noun for a number or gathering of crats? And another thing – how could you hire one or apply to be one?
“Excuse me Frau Merkel – we have a problem here. Could you send us a couple of crats?”
Anyway this whole issue has led to me re-branding myself as a writocrat, busocrat, laundrocrat and very much of a gastrocrat. World governments please note. If you need to pay a big wedge of cash to hire a crat, you need look no further. Once you’ve put a crat in your team you’re on the way to salvation.


Well now, I’ve been kinda loafing about and kinda busy. You poor souls had to clear your inbox every single day of my output and I figured you might need a rest. I actually needed to get down to some good solid chocolate sampling and digging up of sexy tingle dust to sprinkle on a video trailer for “Knockout”. I’m sure some of you already know that it takes about a day to do 10 seconds of visual. If you would like to see my efforts they are here.


At an educational establishment where some of my bus kids attend, they offer “life skills” training. Often this involves retail orientation and expertise development. You probably know this better as shopping. The idea is to show them how to handle money and how to evaluate the best price. During a recent tutorial held in a hypermarket, a student was grabbed by security guards for impulse buying without payment. There are several terms for this practice. The suspect explained that he had been asked to obtain goods at the best possible price. Now, that lad got the best deal in the world.  And they say educational standards are slipping!


Tonight as I drove my bus on a 4 lane highway at about 50 mph a black cat flashed into my vision as it sprinted across the 2 lanes to my right, across my path, body swerved a lorry to my left and sprang on to the foot-way. I’m guessing that’s 4 lives used up. If he makes the return he’ll only have the one in reserve. Should I buy a lottery ticket?

Emma thinx: Why do the big breaks all come in life number nine?