Saturday 31 October 2015

It's Like Beirut Around Here...

Cafés in downtown Beirut
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

O’Brien cut in. ‘Tom? Tom? You okay?’
Dunphy’s voice on the radio was tight. ‘We’re coming in. All units block access roads.’

Blue lights flashing, Dunphy’s car jerked forwards and right, sliding into the yard.

‘Dead. They’re all dead.’ O’Donnell sounded shaky. ‘It’s like Beirut in here.’

I have posted before about Lebanese blogger Jad Aoun's delightful campaign to post 'Looks Like Beirut' certificates to people who use this laziest of comparisons, although it looks like he's no longer running the campaign, which means I won't get my certificate.

Basically, he would send a certificate and some photos of modern Beirut to people who used 'looks like Beirut' to describe various degrees of carnage. Beirut, twenty years after the end of the civil war, doesn't look like that any more. It might stink, but it's not a war zone. It is, as I have pointed out many a time, a sexy, vibrant, gorgeous city with very up ups and, yes, very down downs. But it's not a war zone or the setting for something silly and lazy like 'Homeland'. To quote me:
"Beirut today is a complex city, sexy and shabby, filled with promise and hopeless, vibrant and drab, it rarely fails to entertain and challenge. Plagued by power cuts, creaking infrastructure and endemic corruption, Beirut is full of life, creativity and celebration – even if that celebration sometimes takes on a brittle, desperate air."
I couldn't resist it in my first non-Middle Eastern book and so here, in A Decent Bomber, we have what may be the first ironic use of the 'looks like Beirut' simile in print. You're welcome, Jad. That's what friends are for...

Friday 30 October 2015

Qatar Airways, Bobby Sands And A Decent Bomber.

A mural dedicated to republican hunger striker...
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Here's a story.

Globe-spanning super-airline Qatar Airways started life as a 'labour flight' operator in 1994 with a couple of ageing planes - I would have sworn they were Lockheed TriStars, but aviation history tells me they were either A310s or a Boeing 767, running routes like Nepal and Khartoum. When the airline was relaunched in 1997, I was duly brought in to shape the relaunch of their inflight magazine, Oryx. This meant going to Doha and speaking to various people, including interviewing a chef who was going to introduce 'live cooking stations' in first class and new CEO Akbar Al Bakar, which was interesting.

Naturally, I was flown there on Qatar Airways. The airport, back then known to most in the UAE only as a destination for a 'visa hop' was a shabby little place with a single worn out luggage carousel (there may have been two). Never a happy flier, I was double unhappy in a plane that seemed to me, to say the least, held together with sealing wax and string. On the flight back, I settled down and buried myself in my book. After a while a swarthy gentleman of Iranian demeanour dumped down next to me, the doors closed and we started taxiing. My new companion was clearly taken with the various accoutrements of flight, exploring the safety card, inflight and puke bag with the joy of a wondering child. His arm was in a sling and after a while he settled, happily picking at the scab encrusting a huge burn on his forearm.

I stayed buried in my book, in the pose English Traveller Who Does Not Wish To Talk.

'Kallum Arabi?' (You speak Arabic?)

Oh noes. 'La. Ana mu kallum Arabi.' (No.)

Delight. 'Enta kallum Arabi queiss!' (You do, you devil! You just did it, see?)

Emphatic. 'Mafi Arabi.' (I really, really, really, really don't speak Arabic. And I don't want to talk to you. At all. Ever.)

I plunged back into my book and we took off. The seat belt lights went off. My neighbour, bored with exposing areas of newly-healed pink skin, tried again. I ignored him. He took to nudging me. This was too much. I rounded on him with a snapped 'Khalas!' (Stoppit or I'll fetch yer one on the nose).

A silence. Then, 'Enta Ingleez?' (Are you by any chance a gentleman of an English persuasion?)

'Na'am.' (I am deeply exasperated by you, but yes, as you ask.)

And then, triumphantly, furiously, it came. 'Bobby Sands GOOD!'

He must have been terribly disappointed at the reaction to The Mother Of All Insults. I was utterly bewildered. How the hell would this bloke even know who Bobby Sands was, let alone to throw the name of this dead IRA hunger striker at an Englishman? What did he expect, that I would wither like the Wicked Witch of the North? Quail at the name of this hero of the global revolution?

Having delivered himself of his Parthian shot, he went away to find someone he could chatter with and left me, blinking and trying to work out the whole Sands connection. Quite apart from anything else, Sands had died a full sixteen years before this, in 1981. It's not like this was current news or anything (current affairs have a funny way of affecting you when you travel around the Middle East. I was thrown out of a shop in Riyadh once because we had helped America to bomb Libya) but Sands was clearly still held in Iran as an example of one who had stood against British Imperialism and triumphed.

That enduring link between the IRA and the Middle East is a great deal less tenuous than this one to my new novel, A Decent Bomber, which publishes next week on the 5th November, to coincide with the anniversary of another man who flipped the digit at British Authority, one Guido Fawkes. You can, indeed should, pre-order the book using this here handy link!

Saturday 24 October 2015

The Link Between The Rad Eason Baloo And Parto Caro Larne

English: tintype of a african american male
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
   ‘You African too, then?’
   ‘No.’
   ‘And beardy boy out there? Pakistani?’
   ‘Is nationality so important to you, Mr Pat O’Carolan?’
His deep tones and accent made Pat’s name sound exotic, Parto Caro Larne. Pat turned from his gazing into the yard, his wet hands dripping onto the flagstone floor. ‘Nationality? Sure, it used to be everything to me. Now it doesn’t seem terribly important, tell the truth. Where are you holding my niece?’
   ‘I am not holding her. She is safe.’ Yousuf gestured at the stack of black briefcases in their plastic wrappers stacked along the kitchen wall. ‘You wish for to begin? The more quick you finish these, you see your brother daughter.’

I dropped the car off for servicing this morning. Pretty much total chaos at Al Habtoor, an attempt to regulate the Saturday crowd with a numbering system meeting with spirited resistance from the jostling mob. Got a taxi home and, joy of joys, he was 'new driver'. So given I malum and he no malum, I directed him home. Because I'm an idiot, I pointed out various landmarks for him so he could pick up at least a smattering of 'knowledge'. He wasn't really listening, of course.

Using my writer's vocabulary and language skills, I was able to put together the immortal sentence 'Bridge down left', which did the job. I pointed out the Radisson Blu Sharjah to him, 'This funduq Rad Eason Baloo' and then 'This funduq Cher A Ton', I said and that reminded me of Parto Caro Larne and Mist Air Queen Larne, an African's pronunciation of Irish names in my new book, which I might have forgotten to tell you about, A Decent Bomber.

You do steal rather a lot of the world around you when you embark on this writing thing. I've always admired John le Carré's ability to conjure up an immediately authentic sounding German or Russian with a few phrases. After all these years, I'd hope I can do a decent Arab...

BTW, here's a handy pre-order A Decent Bomber link for a quiet Saturday morning. Thanks to Derek Pereira for the Saturday morning hint...

Friday 23 October 2015

Book Marketing - The UAE, Stunts And Social Glue...

Social-network
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I have, as you may have noticed, a blog. I also have a number of followers on Twitter, Google+ and a few people occasionally keep in touch on Facebook and Instagram. I have an 'author website', which I happen to think is quite natty. And I have a mailing list of quite a few people who have given me permission to share stuff about books with them. You can join them, if you like, by using the simple, easy to use form to the right of this post.

There are a few people out there who review books who have enjoyed my previous work and so have been keen to review the latest. That is a small and steadily growing resource of people who are treasured because they represent a network effect. A review tends to reach a wide audience and have the benefit of providing recommendation.

This, then, is my 'author platform' - my very own marketing machine. All of these people have, for one reason or another, given me permission to talk to them. Not all of them want to talk to me about books, a lot have been attracted by my ranting and other unstable behaviours. And so when I do talk about books, I see a drop in blog traffic and, with an increasing frequency of promotional tweets and posts, provoke a mixture of reactions from disinterest through to mild amusement, bemusement and, when an unseen line has been crossed, even mild irritation.

The balance here is clearly to try and provide interesting, thought provoking or amusing content on these platforms to increase engagement and stretch the elasticity of the Line of Follower Irritation. When it comes to book marketing, I am clearly without morals. And while I'm not quite reduced to screaming 'Buy my book!' in the faces of strangers, there have been times when I've thought about it. The trouble is, of course, people don't automatically go away and buy books just because they're asked to or told to. Oh, how much simpler my universe would be if that were the case! No, there's something else that makes us click on that 'Deliver to my Kindle' button. And I wish to God I knew what it was. I don't even recognise it in myself as a stable or discernible pattern of behaviour.

It's interesting to see how little strength there is to 'social glue', as well. People will 'like' at the drop of a hat and generally make nice, supportive noises. But getting them to take an action, beyond a click, based on social media interactions is not easy - or even a known, defined science. We basically do a number of things we think might result in that (engagement and all that stuff) and hope it's worked. Clicks are not a measure of action - as I've explained before.

Without a doubt, word of mouth has a huge role to play. Reviews, as I have mentioned above, take the form of recommendations* and so have the power of word of mouth - but I haven't seen them create notable spikes in sales. This is hard to track in terms of physical book sales because physical book distribution is such a slow and placid process. On Amazon I get day by day data and analysis and so can see spikes when they occur. They're usually of a binary nature, by the way. I'm not quite in the hundreds of books a day game!

But my experience has been that people, even when they have thoroughly enjoyed, even 'loved' a book, don't necessarily go around berating their friends about it. And a single recommendation isn't enough to send people jetting off to the nearest bookshop, either. Scale has a huge amount to do with it. If you see a positive review, have a friend or even two recommend it and then see it on display in the bookshop, then you may well act. But any of those in isolation will likely not do the job. My personal theory is the average punter will act on a book purchase after five 'touches' - and then only if the last touch is while they're actually in proximity to a BBO - a Book Buying Opportunity.

It's that scale that is the issue, of course, in the UAE - where, incidentally, much of my 'author platform' is located. The market here is relatively small (Olives - A Violent Romance sold out its run of 2,000 copies and is considered consequently to have done really very well here) and also underserved by all the major platforms - Amazon won't play here, Google and Apple have limited offerings and B&N and Kobo are non-existent. And people here will buy my books from me at signings and other events, but they'll tend not to buy a paperback from Amazon to have delivered here.

Which is why at last year's LitFest, I sat next to Orion's Kate Mills and explained that, as a self-publisher, I was weary and recognised that I actually could really do with the scale that an operation such as hers offered to reach into a market like the UK where I cannot, for all my 'platform', reach. It's there where the scale lies that brings quantum effects into play and starts to launch books towards the exosphere. Of course, in order to make that stellar journey, the book has to have 'that' quality, the something that has people interested enough to pick it up, flip it around, scan the blurb and go, 'Hmm. Sounds interesting. I'll give this little puppy a spin.' Or whatever it is they say at that sublime and subtle moment when a complete stranger decides to exchange value for your book...

Meanwhile, I'ma gonna keep plugging away on the A Decent Bomber pre-order campaign. Once November 5 is past, it'll be all about reviews and events. Up until then, I'm quietly nagging people to email their friends to ask them to email their friends with a link to the book. Because in the world of 1,000,000 clicks to get one sale, network effects are king, baby.

See? I got through a whole post without linking to the pre-order A Decent Bomber link on Amazon.com! Oh...

* Unless they're stinkers, of course! I have so far in the main avoided these, although I do say this with the feeling of mild dread that accompanies pronouncements such as 'I've never had a car accident in my life...'

Thursday 22 October 2015

Sectarianism And Decent Bombers

English: The "peace line" or "p...
 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
It was late in the afternoon as Gerald Lynch hopped along the uneven paving that lined Gouraud Street, the heart of Beirut’s bustling Gemayze area. He wore jeans and a leather jacket against the chill spring air, his hands in his pockets as he squeezed between the parked cars.

Gouraud’s bars, as ever, welcomed those who wanted to party and forget the woes of a world where violence and conflict were a distant memory but a constant worry. Orphaned by Belfast’s troubles, Lynch appreciated Beirut’s fragile peace and sectarian divides, the hot embers under the white ash on the surface of a fire that looked, to the casual observer, as if it had gone out. Lynch scowled as he passed a poster carrying Michel Freij’s smiling face, encircled in strong black script: ‘One Leader. One Lebanon.’

Gerald Lynch features in my first three books, a violent and drunken Northern Irish spy. Well, a well-mannered and teetotal one would be a bit less fun. His appreciation of Lebanon's sectarianism is visceral because it mirrors his own experiences growing up during 'the troubles' in Northern Ireland.

It's not until you drive through a wee township bedecked in fluttering Union Jack pennants, bunting and flags, with kerb stones painted red white and blue and murals on the walls that you begin to appreciate the strength and depth of feeling still in the North. Even the nomenclature is loaded: Northern Ireland or the North - or N. Ireland? I say Derry, you say Londonderry. And the next township down the road will be themed green white and gold, although you won't typically find as much bunting and never painted kerb stones in the Catholic areas. They're just more, well, Irish.

I recall my amazement standing by the 'peace wall' in Belfast (pictured above). Dividing Protestant and Catholic neighbourhoods, these walls or 'lines' are found in several places in the north and are mostly higher than the Israeli separation wall. That's pretty mad, no? They're being torn down, but in the meantime have become something of a tourist attraction. Which is at the same time sort of nice and a tad perverse.

The conflation of politics and religion is absolute. Republican Nationalist Catholic, Unionist Loyalist Protestant. The conflict between these two communities goes back centuries, old wounds have never quite healed and unfairnesses never quite been forgiven, let alone forgotten. But in the past twenty years, as in Lebanon, the peace has held. The marching season is an annual incitement, a national holding of breath as everyone in their right minds hopes that it'll pass without incident or a descent into chaos. But with a little give and take, perseverance and a shared will to avoid falling back into the violence and repression, the communities of Northern Ireland have managed to preserve their mutual accommodation. It hasn't all been plain sailing, by any means.

A great deal of the credit for even getting us here belongs to a dead woman. Mo Mowlam was Secretary of State for Northern Ireland in 1998 and was instrumental in pulling together the Good Friday Peace Agreement of that year. Remarkably, she achieved her feats of diplomacy knowing she had brain cancer, a fact she kept secret until forced to respond to the charming British red top newspapers, who were hurling jibes about her dumpy appearance. Her memoir, Momentum, is an exhilarating read, packed with the personality of a straight-talking, no-nonsense woman of remarkable character. Sadly, insanely, the book is out of print. Reading it was one of my more enjoyable research tasks working on A Decent Bomber.

All of this, inevitably, forms the backdrop to the book. Pat used to make bombs for the IRA and doesn't want to do it again. His old mate Brian MacNamara is in politics these days and doesn't need bombs going off, particularly as MacNamara's boss, Sean Driscoll, is standing for election. Former 'freedom fighters', they'd rather not get involved in Pat's upset apple cart and the looting of arms caches* they'd pretended weren't there any more. And then there's Boyle, the boy who watched his da shot by the IRA, who turns into an angry copper...

MacNamara pressed his hands together between his legs. ‘There were plenty big daft lads. On both sides. We depended on them.’
‘Well this one shot my Da. Dropped him there in the garden. Bang. Not even bang bang. Just bang.’
‘I’m sorry.’ MacNamara struggled to still his twisting hands, to lay them on his knees. He caught Boyle’s sideways glower.

Boyle focused back on the road. ‘Sure you are.’

Pat's loss from 'the troubles' still hurts him today. So does Boyle's. They find themselves pitched together, working to face a new threat from outside that, ultimately, unites them. I had never intended the book to be a moral tale about reconciliation, but it's in there somewhere. Inevitably, someone, somewhere will take exception to something I've written in the book, because passions still ignite and feelings still run deep. Twenty years, as anyone in Lebanon will tell you, can pass in the seeming blink of an eye.

But the vast majority of people in both communities never wants to go back. That alone is reason for enormous optimism. And if you do find something you don't like in the book, get in touch. I'll be happy to talk about it. Because, let's face it, when we stop talking is when we're in trouble...

* Demonstrating, once again, that truth is stranger than fiction, two separate arms cache finds were made in Ireland and England earlier this year. Given I'd worried about the unlikely nature of this aspect of my fiction, I was oddly a little relieved when they turned up!

Wednesday 21 October 2015

Emirates Airline Festival Of Literature 2016

French Laundry Cookbook Cover
I not only have this book, but have cooked from it. I hope you're duly impressed...
The LitFest unveiled its 2016 line-up of authors yesterday in a cosy and yet, well, lavish event at the Intercontinental Festival City - the 'home' of the Festival.

There were pass-around canapés. A lot of them. Little deep-fried balls of seafood, cones of houmous and muhammara (an odd nod to the influence of Thomas Keller and his French Laundry), wee bowls of noodles and stacks of tapenade. Pairs of sushi on diddy plates with tiny plastic pipettes of soy sauce. It was all a long way from the usual starving in a remote garret scratching away with a quill and the last of one's home-made ink, I can tell you.

There were mocktails with names like The Grape of Wrath, White Tang and The Wonderful Blizzard of Oz. They weren't half bad, either. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble here and it showed.

The speeches were mercifully short. The unveiling was nicely done, a musical piece by students from Dubai College performed as a sand artist artisted sandily. The list was duly unveiled. It's a pretty stellar lot. Anthony Beevor, James Waterson, Justin Marozzi and John Julius Norwich alone will make any history buff explode in glee. Dom Joly is coming, which is nice as long as he's not going to spend all his time here cooking up an AA Gill. So's the chap behind Bob the Builder (What do you call Bob the Builder when he retires? Bob) and Korky Paul, who as eny fule no is the chap behind Winnie the Witch.

Ian Rankin's on, too. I interviewed him the other day on Dubai Eye Radio. Scottish fellow. As Festival Director Isobel took to the stage, I remembered how during one ad break on that occasion I had been screaming 'Luddites!' at her and my fellow guests/hosts in a spirited exchange about the merits of books vs Kindles. She was remarkably gracious about it, all things considered. Victoria Hislop's coming. I only know of her because my sister in law is a devotee and will be dead jealous. There are a lot more Arab authors this year - and more Emiratis, including Noura Khoori, Sultan Faisal Al Rumaithi, Shaima Al Marzooqi, Sultan Al Ameemi, Lulwah Al Mansouri and, of course, Maytha Al Khayat and Noura Noman. And that's a very good thing indeed. I have made no secret of the fact I think the festival has been a major catalyst for the burgeoning literary scene here in the UAE.

You know where all this is leading, of course. I'm there as well.

I wasn't going to go this year. I was feeling too weary. But Rachel Hamilton and Annabel Kantaria (both of whom are on the list, natch) made me do an about turn and clamber back on the bus. So I'm doing a couple of sessions and will, in fact, launch Birdkill at the Festival. I've wanted to publish a book at the festival for years now (2016 will be its eighth year, can you believe it? I'm feeling very old) but have never managed it. Birdkill, coming as it did out of the blue, means I've got a 'spring book' in hand.

So there we have it. In the meantime, if you're wondering about where to pre-order your copy of A Decent Bomber, the link's here.

:)

Monday 19 October 2015

A Decent Paperback


A big box of books arrived yesterday. In fact, three boxes of books did. Amazon deliverith early and so advance copies of A Decent Bomber as well as copies of the new format Olives and Beirut dropped all together onto my desk while I wasn't looking.

And I am glad.

For all the arguments I have about Kindles, there's something reassuring about a physical book. It's so very, well, booky. And I'm finding quite a few readers remain deeply - indeed emotionally - attached to these papery wodges.

I've talked before about the economics of book production. Both Olives - A Violent Romance and Beirut - An Explosive Thriller were conventionally printed and put on sale in bookstores in the UAE, Bahrain, Lebanon and, oddly, Mumbai. Both sold out their print runs a year or so back, but I have yet to see a final reconciliation from the distributor. Conventional book distribution is like a Massey Ferguson to Amazon's Concorde.

It's amazing how slow, conventional and passive the book industry is. In both cases, I shelled out a load of money up front, watched bookshops and the disty taking 50% of the cover price and wasted a great deal of time trying to gee up sloppy and lazy sales channels. It was time-consuming and, to be honest, ultimately wearying. And it gained very little except possibly making my books marginally more accessible to a relatively small audience.

The alternative is POD - print on demand. Amazon's Createspace is the platform I use for all my books. Basically, when you buy one of my books from Amazon, they print it out especially for you. There are an increasing number of 'inventory free' book print and production solutions out there now, which make enormous sense in our 'long tail' world. The cost per copy is sky-high compared to conventional print, but it's a highly efficient way to produce books for a global audience - and means a much wider choice can be effectively offered to the reader.

The quality of a POD book is, incidentally, just fab. In fact I've found readers consistently preferred the POD book when I've asked them which Olives they prefer. POD also means I can update books, for instance I found a couple of nagging errors in the MS of Beirut and they're gone now. And, of course, my restoration of Shemlan will, when I finish it, automatically turn into an updated book. Which is all rather nice.

As I've said before, if you are a writer of books and would like a kick-ass Createspace template for a 5"x8" novel format, hit me up right here.

For now, though, it's a quick bask in the glow of all my lovely new books. I'll be shelling out copies to reviewers - Talking of Books is getting a load tomorrow at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature launch event at the Intercon in Festival City. The rest I am saving for a very special date indeed...

Friday 16 October 2015

A Decent Bomber And The Wilfulness of Characters

Republican mural, Derry 1986, with evidence of...
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
A gentle tapping on his cheek. A wipe of wet cloth on his forehead. The awareness of light though his swollen lids. An insistent voice, deep, repeated his name. ‘Mister Quinlan, Mister Quinlan.’ Accented, the title sounded more like mist air.
   He took a deep, juddering breath and tried to focus. His hands flared pain. He tasted blood, his mouth dry. Cool ceramic touched his lips and he leaned forwards to sip gratefully at the icy water. His shattered ribs grated and forced him to cry out, bubbling the water. He spilled a pink dribble down his sodden, spattered shirt.
   'Can you hear me Mister Quinlan?’ Mist Air Queen Larne ‘There has been a mistake. These men have been foolish. Do you understand?’
    Quinlan nodded. He could just make out the face peering into his own, a look of concern on the dark-skinned features. He tried to speak, his fat lips throbbed and tore, a stab of pain. ‘W-who?’
   ‘My name doesn’t matter, Mister Quinlan. Some call me The Accountant. It is but a conceit. You are safe, now. Tell me, who is the bomb maker, please? The one who made the big bombs?’
   Quinlan groaned. He tried to raise his head. ‘Big?’ He saw stars, felt a deep lassitude. The cold cloth was pressed to his brow again.
   ‘You remember? The bombs your people made for London and Manchester. People still talk of them. The very, very big bombs. Boom.’
   Christ, but that was twenty year and more ago! Quinlan wanted to say. But the cat had his tongue.
   ‘Come. You know who made them. Tell me his name, Mister Quinlan.’
   It came to him. Of course it did. Jesus, but that was Pat. Dear old Pat.
   ‘Pat,’ Quinlan croaked. ‘Pat O’Carolan.’
   ‘Where is he?’
   He tried to grin. Ah, these people. Stop, now. ‘Tipp. South Tipp.’ Another beautiful sip of water offered to his beaten lips.
   Bliss.
   ‘Where is Tip, please?’
   ‘Tipperary. The-the Republic.’ He was drooling, sloppy-mouthed. The pain clamoured, in and out of focus in waves, his battered nerves shrieked every time he moved his broken body.
   ‘And what is his code word?’
   ‘I-I don’t know any c-code—’
   The blow to his cheek came fast and with the hard edge of the man’s hand. Quinlan’s jaw crunched. Pain blossomed in his mouth, both old ache and new sharp. His tied arms stiffened and his bloody hands pulsed agony. He moaned and spat out a tooth.
   He sagged against his restraints, snivelling as he tried to breathe through the bloody mucus filling his nose and mouth. ‘Dan.’ He moaned. ‘Breen. Code word. Dan Breen. Danbreen.’

The opening scene of A Decent Bomber was actually the last piece of the book I wrote. The final pass of a number of edits, this one 'filled in' a number of scenes and events I had lazily passed over in the original writing. Sometimes it's these very events you take for granted which actually contain the most important bits in developing the book. In this case, the old version of the book opened with Pat hearing something in his yard and then two Irish Republican politicians discussing Quinlan's fate.

It wasn't enough. Quinlan had to get it, and bad, and we had to be there with him and share his treatment at the hands of some very bad people. I didn't know he had wee girls or a wife called Deirdre or that his mother had died, but somehow in the space of a couple of pages, Quinlan acquired these things (as well as a number of particularly nasty injuries). I did love Mist Air Queen Larne, too. I'm sure it's wrong to enjoy your own writing like this, a sort of literary onanism.

Similarly, Pat's niece Orla was never meant to have a girlfriend, a relationship that throws her life into turmoil. Orla had never considered herself to be you know, different and yet here she was falling for another girl she met at a party. This whole development was the last thing on my mind and I do not for the life of me know where it came from, it just happened. One minute she's on a train looking out of the window and twizzling her red hair, reflected in the window and then, bam, she's falling for another girl, trying to come to terms with this newly awakened sexuality and wondering how she's going to break the news to her Uncle Pat.

It's odd how these things can develop. That relationship, unintended in my original telling, becomes crucial to the story of A Decent Bomber. Orla, already in a state of considerable confusion, gets treated pretty badly in the scheme of things. Not only is she confronted by her strange feelings for another woman, she finds out her beloved uncle Pat isn't quite what he seemed to be. The rock and anchor she seeks in her new turbulence turns out to be a catalyst for complete chaos.

Boyle wriggled his way into the story as an uninvited guest as well. And nobody was as surprised at the way his love life turns out as I was. One minute he's in his office and the next my fingers had tapped out a scene that was the last thing from my mind. I actually sat back and questioned what the hell had just gone on there. I hadn't meant it to happen at all and then found myself having to deal with the consequences - just as Boyle must have had to have done.

Sometimes these things happen. Characters do stuff they're not supposed to, grow a life for themselves and make their own decisions. You just have to go along with it and let them do their thing. It often works out rather wonderfully - in Shemlan, for instance, it led to the whole glorious car chase across a frozen Baltic sea. I didn't even know the Baltic froze over, let alone that there were seasonal ice roads connecting the Estonian mainland with its islands. In A Decent Bomber, that unplanned relationship of Orla's ended up resolving the whole book.

What goes around comes around, in writing books as in life...

A Decent Bomber is currently available on Amazon.com and all decent book outlets on pre-order, publishing on November 5th 2015. Go and do it now, don't put it off. You know it makes sense...

Thursday 15 October 2015

A Booky Spring Cleaning

English: Specimen of the typeface Palatino.
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

With the publication of A Decent Bomber came the opportunity to do a quick clean of the Augean stables that is my 'back list' - the books already out there in the cruel world.

For a start there was a new cover for Olives - A Violent Romance which brings it into line with the style of the others. And it's easier to ditch the black spines because the printing's not always accurate enough to avoid the odd wee strip escaping onto the front cover.

Then an overhaul of the books' interior templates - a move to Palatino, a slightly 'roomier' font than Garamond - but keeping Perpetua as my title font. The result is a bit spacier and more accessible all round. By the way, if you're in the market for a kick-ass Createspace template for 5x8" format novels, hit me up and I'll happily share.

And then on to Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy. The book's editor, Bubblecow's Gary Smailes, ditched the 'backstory' chapters in the book to create a more accessible narrative that flowed more easily. That change, impacting some 30,000 words in all, was reflected in the original Shemlan when it published and it had the desired effect.

But it's been a while now and I've had time to think it over. In creating a more straightforward read, I was missing some of the spirit I had originally intended for the book, the contrast between Jason Hartmoor the young man full of hope and spirit and Hartmoor the lifetime diplomat whose failed marriage and lacklustre career had hardened him into unyielding and crusty later life. The story of Jason and Mai was rather sacrificed to the cuts, as well. And that was a story I wanted to tell. And, finally, the evocation of Beirut in the late 1970s and the British 'spy school' up in the Chouf was lost - and that was sort of core to my original scheme for the book.

And so I have been restoring the book, on the grounds that I only have myself to please. Well, I have you lot to please, too - but I generally find you're happy enough with what I get up to. It's the agents and publishers who seem to think whatever it is I decide to do is simply not commercial enough to bother them. And they are clearly never going to revise their somewhat dim view of what it is I do.

I'll let you know when the restored version goes up, but you can always sign up (just over on the right there) to my mailer to get the news first or to get your hands on the restored edition as a free ebook. Meanwhile I'm still trying to think up new daft schemes to get people to pre-order A Decent Bomber so it makes a wee blip on the charts come the 5th November. Any suggestions would be more than welcome, I can tell you!

Tuesday 13 October 2015

The UK Mainland's Biggest Bombs

Abu Nidal (album)
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Róisín handed the joint to Orla, who shook her head. ‘No thanks. Not my thing.’ She waved her glass. ‘Are you a student too?’
‘Sure, I am.’
‘What you studying?’
‘Terrorists. You?’
Orla searched Róisín’s face, but it was without guile. ‘Animal husbandry. How do you mean, terrorists?’
‘Just that. Terror studies.’
‘You’re kidding me. That’s a course?’
Róisín laughed, shaking her head. ‘What’s so odd about it? You look like someone just slapped your arse.’
‘I suppose it seems strange that someone would want to… well, that. Oh, I don’t know. Don’t we see enough about them every day?’
‘This nation was founded on terrorism. If it wasn’t for Michael Collins, Dan Breen and the likes of them there’d be no Ireland. We’d still be a British colony.’

Now we're into dangerous territory. Writing A Decent Bomber, I was well aware that I was going to get caught up with a thriller sub-genre that has emerged over the past decade - evil terrorist (preferably Arab) nicks big explody thing and threatens the free and decent world until our square-jawed steely-eyed hero takes him down. That's no way what this book's about and I would hope most fervently it's a million leagues smarter than that. And, for me as well as most average readers, 'it's about terrorists' is a turnoff. As Orla says, who wants to talk about that?

And yet the idea of a retired terrorist who represents an era when terrorism was 'real' coming up against the bandits and insurgents who inhabit the failed states left in the wake of our attempts at imperialism drew me.

What on earth do I mean by 'real'?

I remember, growing up in the '70s and '80s, how life went on despite the IRA. There was even something of a 'spirit' about it - they're not going to grind us down, matey. But these days, for some reason, whenever some hopeless numb-nut puts a bomb in the heel of his shoe that doesn't quite go off, or finds a liquid explosive combination, we're all made dance around airports in our socks and wave our clear plastic bags in the air. We've never been safer, our governments tell us and yet we have never been so threatened they claim in the next breath.

We're so cowed, we've spent years helping mendacious duty free companies claim back our VAT because we're just, well, compliant in airports. It's for our own good, after all.

Terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s was international, multinational. We had the PLO, the Red Brigades, Baader Meinhof, ETA and lots, lots more. Airline hijackings - and bombings - in the 1960s, '70s and '80s took place all over the world. There were over 40 incidents of terrorism in the air in the 1970s alone. One of them, Abu Nidal bringing down a Gulf Air jet (GF 771 in case you were interested) in 1983 with the loss of all on board, took place in Jebel Ali. Rather close to home! At the same time, on the ground, the world was rocked by waves of terrorist violence.

The IRA's campaigns in Ireland and mainland Britain were relentless and sustained, prosecuted in the face of an overwhelming military and police presence and the focused resource of a fully functioning, technologically advanced first world power. Despite the full machinery of the British security services, the IRA detonated a number of bombs on the British mainland, including the two largest explosions since WWII, the infamous London Docklands bomb and the Manchester bomb.

The Docklands bomb killed two people and did an amazing amount of damage. It weighed over a ton. The Manchester bomb wounded over 200 people and blew out the heart of Manchester, causing over a million pounds' worth of damage. It, too, weighed over a ton. Both were timed bombs packed into vans. The bombers were never apprehended - certainly not in relation to the bombings.

And we're shuffling around in our socks when we fly because of heel bombs.

So I thought the meeting between 'new' terror and 'old' terror might be interesting. You can clearly (and really, really should, you know) find out what happens by clicking here.

From The Dungeons

Book Marketing And McNabb's Theory Of Multitouch

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