Pete Fellows

Madeline had died. No not recently. No, she wasn’t a vampire, erghh. Madeline is a barista. A mediocre one. She lives in New York but also not New York. It’s New York but virtual, and she’s virtually living there as a virtual person. She used to be an actual person but since dying she’s less so.

Life was pretty normal until a guy walked in her coffee shop and turned all the coffee into wine. Then there was an incident with an Accountant who was a dragon (yes literally, well virtually)… Show more

Madeline had died. No not recently. No, she wasn’t a vampire, erghh. Madeline is a barista. A mediocre one. She lives in New York but also not New York. It’s New York but virtual, and she’s virtually living there as a virtual person. She used to be an actual person but since dying she’s less so.

Life was pretty normal until a guy walked in her coffee shop and turned all the coffee into wine. Then there was an incident with an Accountant who was a dragon (yes literally, well virtually). Then events got really crazy.
She misplaced her friend Mike and in trying to find him uncovered a conspiracy that could change her world forever. Zeroworld that is. A virtual world that everyone had forgotten. It had been relatively normal for hundreds of years with the exception of rampant inflation and the malaise created by an absence of mortal peril. When you re-introduce mortality and fantasy creatures into a world like that well someone has to be behind it. And that person might just be good with numbers.

This is a novel about avoiding death by becoming virtual. It’s a hybrid science fiction and fantasy story uncovering a conspiracy, fighting against it and developing powers, some of them useful. If you like strong female leads (there are three), double crosses, what it would be like to live after death and cheesecake then you may have found the book for you.

Also available on Kindle (including Kindle unlimited): https://amzn.eu/d/0puNU2m Show less

This is the second part of an article I published earlier in the year primarily about my early days in recruitment. I’m not really sure why I’m writing them exactly, possibly self-aggrandisement, or to highlight how different (or similar) recruitment was back then, or so you can get to know me better and perhaps by extension where Fellows and Associates’ philosophies were formed.

I began my career in recruitment in February 1998. This makes me very very old. Recruitment in the late 1990s was a very different animal to today, so in what is going to be a very self-indulgent article I am going to run through some of my earlier experiences and aim to draw (or at least hint at) some parallels. I am not sure though, let’s see how we get on. I reserve the right to the odd tangential passage or two, as this is a personal piece from my own (possibly warped) perspective.

When the financial meltdown hit in 2008, patent firms in the UK, being a relatively conservative bunch, arguably made some reactionary decisions which has had an impact on the profession ever since. There were some firms that made redundancies, typically cutting more junior members of staff - those not yet qualified, and/or cancelling graduate hires.

You’ve been a trainee patent attorney for a year. And working in intellectual property is great. But you hate your firm. Or, you are wondering if there is a practice out there that would suit you better. Surely you can’t leave after such a short time? It was really difficult to get into profession in the first place.

The lack of salaries on job advertisements, both on and off line, is a criticism I hear directed at myself and my competitors working in the Intellectual Property sector a great deal. There is (at least in my case) unfounded suspicion that the advertised positions are in some way not genuine, because no salary information is contained; or, that whilst genuine, we do not understand the firms well enough to know what they will pay; or, that it is just a fishing expedition on behalf of a firm (or… Show more

The lack of salaries on job advertisements, both on and off line, is a criticism I hear directed at myself and my competitors working in the Intellectual Property sector a great deal. There is (at least in my case) unfounded suspicion that the advertised positions are in some way not genuine, because no salary information is contained; or, that whilst genuine, we do not understand the firms well enough to know what they will pay; or, that it is just a fishing expedition on behalf of a firm (or worse still just the recruiter trying to generate candidates). The aim of this article is to hopefully shed a little light on the recruitment process and get to the bottom of this critique. Show less

Pete Fellows discusses how an era has ended for him and the changes since August 2009.