Oh Noes! More Bookery!

English: The second generation Amazon Kindle, showing the book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It's all about books this week, but then it's London Book Fair week, so why not?

Not least of this week's book news is I'll be publishing a new book over the weekend and it's not quite what you'd expect. more below.

Meantime, I've been tweaking the MS of Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy as feedback comes in from beta readers, with quite a bit of work to do over the coming week or so. I've had to shelve it because of other commitments, of which more below...

I spent a happy 45 minutes cackling, screaming and talking in tongues in front of a mildly horrified audience of about 40 people at Dubai's More Cafe last night. I talked about books, writing, publishing and creating narrative and enjoyed myself thoroughly, as usual. The audience didn't throw things, which is always a good sign.

As I mentioned the other day, I'm trawling my way through Edward Rutherfurd's 'Paris' in readiness for my co-hostin' slot on Dubai Eye Radio's Talking of Books this Saturday. I can't say I'm getting to grips with it terribly well, but it's probably me. It's odd having to read a papery booky book rather than my preferred Kindle format - and I'm finding the whole bulk of the thing rather unwieldy to tell the truth.

And, of course, Saturday afternoon I'm giving two booky workshops at The Archive's 'Day of Books' event. Just in case you're interested they are, respectively:

3:00pm-4:30pm – ‘How Not to Write a Book’: So you’ve written a book, or you want to write a book. What DON’T you want in there? What needs to come out? How can you self-edit your work? What can you avoid ever putting in there in the first place so you don’t have to bother taking it out? Alexander McNabb guides you through a bunch of useful self editing tips.

5:00pm-6:30pm – ‘How to Publish an E-Book Step by Step’: Putting an e-book online in print and electronic formats is as easy as pie. Alexander McNabb takes you through the process step by step using a practical MS file to book example!

Here's the event link again - there are workshops by writers like Kathy Shalhoub, Frank Dullaghan,
Zeina Hashem Beck and Rewa Zeinati all through the day, with kids' stuff in the morning, more grown up stuff in the afternoon and 'readings under the stars' into the evening. Do come by!

The 'practical MS file to book example' in that second workshop I'm doing, by the way, is a compilation of my favourite bits from the first two years of this very blog. It's the easiest way I could find something at least vaguely practical or viable to publish as an e-book. Going back over the Fake Plastic archive was quite fun - it reminded me of a number of moments in the past I'd simply forgotten - it's not a bad record of that odd period when Dubai was at the height of its property-boom fuelled madness, throwing itself pell-mell at materialism, consumerism and all sorts of other isms before it smacked into a brick wall like Tom chasing Jerry as he makes it to the mousehole. That transition from quaffing bubbly to scrabbling for pennies is quite nicely covered.

I'll be publishing Fake Plastic Souks - The Glory Years for pennies on Amazon, so do look out for it! :)