The Dead Sea Hotel

I've gone and done the book thing again.

I finished my fifth serious novel, Birdkill, in February 2016 and that was lovely. I messed around for a while doing nothing in particular and then around May or June I started playing with a scheme that had first occurred to me back in November 2014, when I was in Cairo for a conference on the future of publishing, which took place at the Townhouse Cairo. The Goethe Institut was kind enough to fund my trip and stay and they put me up at the Windsor Hotel. To call this a fascinating place was to completely understate things. It hadn't been touched since the British had left, back when it was used as the officer's club. It was a gift, really.

Krikor Manoukian is the proprietor of the run-down Dead Sea Hotel. His beloved wife Lucine is dead, his daughter Araksi is in love and Manoukian is in debt up to his eyeballs. The last thing he needs is a dead Englishman but that’s just what he’s got. Worse, the man turns out to have been a spy who has left a valise in the hotel safe. When guests start arriving and Manoukian’s hotel fills up for the first time in years, he’s delighted: less so when they all embark on a murderous hunt for the valise. And then the devil checks in...

The idea of an Armenian running a hotel just as insanely old fashioned and decrepit as the Windsor but set in Amman, Jordan struck me as rather fun, but about 10,000 words in I stopped and put it away. I just wasn't enjoying it anymore and I had many better things to do. Two years later, I blew the cobwebs off it and started work on it again. I wasn't sure if it was genius or nuts, which is always a good sign. I sent off the first scrap to writer pals Annabel and Rachel. What did they think? They liked it. So I set to and got stuck back in. That was at the start of Ramadan. Now it's Eid, four weeks later, and I'm done. The story took over my life, the characters refused to lie down and be quiet, I was caught in manic bouts of writing; I thought about nothing else. My waking moments were little revelations, a new scene here, a quirk there.

And now it's all edited. 75,000 words of gibbering insanity and a foray into magical realism, a change of direction which you would probably understand if you had read Birdkill. I am very happy indeed with the end result which almost certainly means it's unreadable, unsaleable and unlovable. Remember, I'm the bloke that thought Space (First Amazon review: 'this book is not funny') was funny.

It's with beta readers. It's going to a few agents. And then, as usual, it'll get self published.

The Unbearable Lightness Of Not Writing

English: Erik Pevernagie, painting. Representing the opposition with lightness of being (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I'm not writing.

I'm not editing or marketing, either. I'm not planning, plotting or playing with a new MS. I started a new book but it's come to a sort of 'meh' point and I've put it aside while I do other things. I've scribbled a few short stories and other things, but nothing really significant.

It's mildly embarrassing when you meet people who know you only as a booky person, because they invariably (and perfectly politely) ask what you're working on at the moment and 'I'm not really, I've just sort of got nothing right now that's floating my boat' sounds wrong.

But it's God's honest, guv. I see no reason to force things and the new project is nowhere near qualifying for that excellent advice that saw me race to get A Decent Bomber done, 'Finish!'

I'm glad I'm not under contract. The agent/publisher would be nagging, reminding me an MS is due in next month and I'd be going spare about it, wracking my brains to force words onto the screen as I write in the certain knowledge that it's not really what I want to do or, indeed, what I want to write. And, by extension, that it's not really quite good enough to put my name on it and be proud of what I've done. I'd hate that.

It's not like it matters, of course. As we speak I languish in complete obscurity as a writer, so my lack of a new project is hardly going to have the NYT worrying about the future of literature.

In fact, it's something of a bonus. There's a certain sense of relief at not having characters bumbling around in my head all the time, not worrying about getting that next scene down or being niggled by a piece of dialogue. I've been doing more cooking, ambling about on the Internet and going out at weekends to rediscover bits of the Emirates. It's amazing how you get blasé about living somewhere as downright wonderful and exotic as Lalaland.

And no, I've not been posting here very much. I realised the other day that this silly little blog of mine will turn ten years old next month. That's pretty venerable. I suppose I shall have to celebrate in some way.

In the meantime, I'm enjoying the, well, lightness of not writing...

Never Before In History Have So Many Readers Bought So Many Books From So Many Authors.

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There have been a number of recent reports celebrating the ‘undeath’ of print, with a reported decline in the growth of ebooks and a growth in print books. It is, of course, total bunkum.

All of the figures breathlessly trotted out to a compliant and all too credulous media are based on sales of traditionally published books by large publishers. America has been wooed by figures from Nielsen which only cover books with ISBN numbers (omitting, therefore, every single book published straight to Kindle), while the UK has been assured that a sales decline among the big five publishers is representative of the market (when it most clearly is not).

It all rather reminds me of the knight who won’t stand aside in Monty Python’s Holy Grail. ‘Rubbish,’ he declaims after his arm’s hacked off, ‘’tis but a scratch.’

Now I, oddly enough, don’t actually care what format you prefer to read your books in. Whether you love the smell of printed books or believe the earth is flat, that’s fine by me. I don’t buy into this whole triumphalism of print over ‘e’. It’s all a bit like the Mac vs PC stuff: too much pointless partisanship. The consumer will, when the smoke blows away, dictate what format of content they prefer.

The greatest danger of all, to my mind, is that the book itself will decline. But the sight of traditional publishers, desperately bobbing about in the sea, clinging to the wooden spar of traditional print, warehouse, sale and return – the model that has sustained most of them through long, long careers - pricing ebooks at unreasonably high levels and then pointing to consumer reluctance to pay those prices as a sign that the format itself is broken, is more than I can bear.

Never before in history have so many readers bought so many books from so many authors. The truth of the quiet revolution taking place is that people who otherwise would never have got their books to market (me, for example) are now able to share their work with global audiences. There are thousands of people out there finding new readers and millions of readers finding new authors whose work they enjoy.

Don’t get me wrong – every lunatic who thinks they've written the best thing since War and Peace now escapes the qualitative filtering process, so there’s lots of rubbish out there, too. But I have never met anyone who could put their hand on their heart and say they haven’t ever bought a traditionally published book that was utter rubbish.

The processes have changed. The filters have changed. As with every aspect of the digital communications revolution, we are expected to take more responsibility for the content we consume and share. We are editors more than ever before, we are the filtration process. It’s not perfect, there’s plenty of room for evolution. But it’s still all very, well, punk and I love it for that.

Never before in history have so many readers bought so many books from so many authors. And almost half of them are independently published by authors or small presses - with the penetration of ebooks in this incredibly diverse and dynamic new market blossoming thanks to low price points that reward readers and, critically, reward authors just as well, if not better, than their 10% share of a printed book's cover price through a big publisher.

Decline. Pfft.

Friday State Of Mind

"A Decent Bomber was an excellent story."

"I read and reviewed prior novels by Alexander McNabb (Shemlan, Olives, and Beirut). I enjoyed all of them, and recommend them to anyone who enjoys a good thriller. In my opinion, A Decent Bomber is the best yet."

"McNabb moves from the familiar ground of the Middle East to Ireland, and remnants of the Provisional IRA. Thoroughly enjoyed this book. A really pacey thriller with brilliant characters."

"Crime, political, conspiracy, action thriller, call it what you need to, this one is a page turner you do not want to miss."

"Thoroughly enjoyable."

"Enjoyably nasty canter through a familiar Troubles-based background."

Straight five stars on Amazon. Rave reviews. It's sold less than 200 copies.

Sometimes I think I'm missing something massive, shake my head and just move on...

That Was The LitFest That Was

I'm feeling slightly shell-shocked this morning. The weekend's whirl is over and I realised, probably massively belatedly but then I am a bear of remarkably little brain, from the moment I started the process of editing and formatting Birdkill, I was preparing for it.

I got roped into a panel on science fiction at the last minute, which was a little bit strange. One of the panellists decided we were all going to start with a reading which I thought odd, but I was feeling benign and generally happy go lucky and so went along with the scheme. There should be a law banning people who assert they 'read rather well' from ever reading their books to an audience.

The invitation to a science fiction panel came because of the mad eugenics, drugs and battlefield enhancement program that's at the heart of Birdkill. I thought of explaining that it's actually reflective of some real-life, modern-day programs run by people like DARPA but threw that up and just agreed to it. In all things bookish, I have a policy of never, ever saying 'no' to anything - something I have rarely had cause to regret, BTW.

It all went well enough, I suppose and we chatted happily about how Sci-Fi has sort of grown up and is no longer the guilty secret read it was when I was a kid, how writing 'near future' Sci-Fi is harder than space opera and other stuff. I was there more as a fan than anything, I suppose. I managed to get in a dig about how explorer of suburban dystopias JG Ballard would have loved writing a novel set in Arabian Ranches, which was all rather fun.

I went to Justin Marozzi's talk about Baghdad which was great. One of the perks of being a LitFest author is your wee badge gives you 'access all areas' and you can attend sessions without a ticket - something I always manage to make all too little use of. I had read Marozzi's history of Baghdad with fascination and similarly enjoyed his presentation. Of course he had to tell the Haroun Al Rashid story. Tsk Tsk.

The how to find your route to publication and onto shelves panel was an absolute hoot. Having in previous years found myself debating the role of traditional publishing vs self publishing with people like Luigi Bonomi (the world's nicest literary agent) and Orion's Kate Mills (an eminently sensible and most likeable lady), it was nice to finally encounter someone who represented the face of traditional publishing I felt I could really disagree with. Jonathan Lloyd is chairman of Curtis Brown, a very big London literary agency, and he was eventually provoked into aiming a sentence at me starting with 'With all due respect' - a phrase all English people know means 'I am about to be rude to you' and Jonathan didn't fail us, advising me that perhaps I might better spend my time learning how to write well instead of dancing around wasting it playing at book marketing.

I am very glad, in hindsight, that I noted the English preamble to discourtesy rather than trying to address the assumption behind it. I'd have come across as an angry and defensive person and I most certainly am neither of those (at least when it comes to writing and publishing my books!). I'm perfectly happy that traditional publishing should continue to strive to exist, as I am that they have clearly decided the things that interest me and how I tell my stories are not for them. Given that, the swipe rather back-fired. Mind, I don't think I'll be signed up by Curtis Brown any time soon...

Arrow's Selina Walker took perhaps a more benign view of the changing face of publishing and the opening up of the market to wider choice and it was clear that publishers and agents are no longer quite as aligned as they once were. Jonathan's assertion that agents were on the side of the author while publishers were in it for themselves drew a polite, measured but I felt slightly pained response.

This was the stuff though - I would describe the panel as lively and it must have been highly entertaining for the audience, which is what you're after really, isn't it?

But I had the most fun the next day, with the panel on crime I shared with Chris Carter and Sebastian Fitzek, both of whom write about serial killers, psychopaths and really, really bad people. I noted to the audience that I felt like something of a fraud - my bad guys are just bad, but they're pussies compared to Chris and Sebastian's bad guys. My bad guys steal ice creams from small kids, stuff like that. They won't rape you while they're sucking out your brains with a straw. Truth be told, my good guys are more of a worry...

We talked about research - meeting IRA members, serial killers and forensic surgeons; about inhabiting the grey area between good and evil; about creating empathy for horrible characters and how you handle putting yourself in the head of a killer. I did a lot of book plugging, for which I am truly contrite.

Both Chris and Sebastian are very nice guys who have some worrying stuff going on in their heads, but they're engaging and genial talkers who conjured a great deal of laughter from the audience. We wrapped up on the hour and it was clear both authors and audience would gladly have stayed another hour and more bouncing all these questions, ideas and experiences around.

We signed books afterwards and some people turned up to have me sign my books which is lucky because that doesn't usually happen and I was dreading getting sandwiched between two international best-sellers with my usual queue of three (mind you, they put me next to 'House of Cards' author Michael Dobbs the day before. As usual, a line disappearing into the horizon next to the yawning space left in front of me after I'd signed a few books. Le sigh.)

As usual, the LitFest team were glorious, wonderful, patient and kind. If there was a single hitch or hiccup, I certainly didn't spot it. Tens of thousands of people, 160 authors, hundreds of sessions, events, happenings, talks and signings. And it was all as seamless as a seamless thing.

So here we are. Facing a world without the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature - at least for another year. What AM I going to do?

Not write another book for a while, I can tell you...

What? MOAR LitFest Panels?

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I'm doing a third panel at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature, "Future Shock: Writing from a Sci-Fi World" after LitFest luminary Aedan caught a blog post about Birdkill and realised it had weird sciency eugenics stuff in it.

The panel blurb goes thusly:

Humanity has found itself living in the future, and it could be argued that so far we have singularly failed to rise to the challenge. We ask our panel of three very different authors, who generally write in other genres but have recently written one or more science fiction novels – will we survive the world we are creating?

You could argue, funnily enough, that silly first novel Space was science fiction (I'd have called it a high tech thriller spoof, but what I call my books has nothing to do with what people get up to. Just ask that there 'trilogy' of Middle Eastern spy thrillers), so I've got previous 'form', but Birdkill's spooky Hamilton Institute certainly would appear to be the stuff of futurism, although as we now know it's not really far fetched at all.

I've been doing a lot of work in the day job related to futurism and have always sort of paddled in the march of technology area, right from back when I used to write for, edit and publish computer and telecoms magazines and books. So this might be quite fun. I'm joining Dr Who novelist Jenny Colgan as well as space opera author Garth Nix to kick around the proposition that humanity may not survive its own inventions.

The panel's from 10-11am on Friday 11th March at the Al Baraha 1 room at the Intercon Festival City. It's linked here for your convenient LitFest ticket buying pleasure.

And don't forget, you can also come along to:

And Now the Hard Part: Getting Your Book into Print and onto Shelves 
Friday 11 March, 3.30pm-4.30pm Al Ras 2, InterContinental 

Where me and another writer type join two publishing types to talk about getting picked up, marketed and generally turned into a best selling international smash hit sensation. 

Crime Across Continents: How to catch a killer
Saturday 12 March, 11.30am-12.30pm Al Ras 1, InterContinental

Where I join worryingly capable inventors of nasty serial killers Chris Carter and Sebastian Fitzek to talk about how you make your bad guys really, really bad.

Birdkill: Why I Couldn't Quite Get Out Of The Middle East

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

'You write very well, you know. You just need to get out of the Middle East. It's doing you no favours. We really, really don't care about it.'

So did a prominent London literary agent advise me. The words hit home hard: I had thought being the only person writing spy thrillers set in this most colourful and conflicted area since Eric Ambler gave us The Levanter would be a good thing, but apparently not. The 'we' he referred to was the Great British Public - the people UK publishers want to sell books to.

I didn't have a firm 'next project' lined up after Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy and I had been toying with the idea of making a book out of my 'Uncle Pat' joke. And so was born A Decent Bomber. I set about abandoning the Middle East with as much distress and compunction as the average psychopath has for his victim. How was I to know that, in terms of attracting British publishing, the next worst place on earth to set a book after the Middle East was Northern Ireland?

By Birdkill I'd given up trying to please anyone but myself, and yet the book was to be set in the UK. It is explicitly not located anywhere in particular. I started out with my short story as a basis and began to construct a narrative around it. That narrative exploded, pages filling with great rapidity as the dreams that had formed the beginning and end of the book raced to meet each other.

Soon enough, Mariam Shadid came calling and simply refused to leave. Great, so now I've got a Lebanese journalist with frizzy hair and a taste for combat trousers and a click-hungry Middle Eastern scandal/gossip website. The Edgware Road poked its damn oud, shisha and cardamom coffee-scented nose in. The pull continued: Robyn's past was drawn inexorably to Zahlé with its restaurants alongside the rushing little torrent of the Berdawni River and its tiled rooftops scattered across the rolling Beqaa. And then, if that wasn't all bad enough, the Château Ksara came calling with its beguiling wiles and wines.

Mary was chatting with Félicie at reception when the Englishman stalked in, an overgrown beanpole of a man, grey-haired with an aristocratic English nose and points of piercing blue under bushy brows. He looked dry and papery, but powerful. The Lebanese have a nose for power, she surmised. Some are attracted to it, seek it; moths to a candle. Others flee it, fearing the trouble and disruption it brings to our precarious lives. She sighed.

‘I would like to speak with Monsieur Delormes as a matter of urgency, please.’ He announced to Félicie who was, and this was her way if you but knew her, unimpressed. She flicked her hair back and glanced over at Mary with a hint of a roll to her eyes.

‘Would you? Who will I say is calling?’

‘Lawrence Hamilton. It is in regard to his new patient.’

Mary tried not to betray her interest. ‘I can take him there.’ She tried to mask her quickening with a shrug. ‘If you like.’

And quite where Sister Mary, the fag-smoking Lebanese nun, came from I could not even begin to tell you, even if you put the thumb screws on.

There's not much Lebanon in there, to be honest, but there's a scattering. Enough to let you know that the Middle East ain't giving me up that easily. Which, oddly enough, I find something of a comfort...

School's Out...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Running in a new car on the Dubai-Al Ain highway is not something I'd recommend, people. It's deadly boring. Nevertheless, this is what I done today as I made my way to Al Ain based Brighton College to appear as an author courtesy the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature.

I spoke to two classes, senior boys and girls respectively (the school's segregated) and the girls were generally more amused and proactive than the boys, who were a little reserved.

The staff members were understandably a little nervous, given the content of my books and my own inclination to go off on the deep end. They have to tread a fine line between tradition and the exploration of international literature, at the same time managing a number of bright, sparky and inquisitive minds. Needless to say, I had a blast. We talked about narrative and its importance, the characterisation of the Middle East by Hollywood and the impact of technology and the Internet on publishing, heralding the inevitable doom of the print run/sales team model of publishing.

After the classroom sessions with the seniors, we were joined by the 8-11 year-olds in the auditorium. This, I was not prepared for. They'd asked me to prepare some readings to give the kids and I gazed down at small, angelic girls with missing teeth beaming up at me and on the instant junked the lot. I couldn't really see my reading from A Decent Bomber helping the 8 year olds sleep that night...

The torture was methodical. Quinlan shrieked himself hoarse, flailing around tied to the kitchen chair until he hurled himself to the floor. They righted him and beat him as dispassionately as they’d pulled out his thumbnails.

And not one word. Not a question. It made it all worse, to think there was nothing they wanted he could give them to make it stop.

They started on his fingers. He called to God, he called to his dear, dead mother. He begged them. Dear Jesus, how he begged. They beat him again to shut him up. His mind slammed down to buy him respite.

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.

And it went downhill from there fast when we started looking at readings from Birdkill and Shemlan...

So instead I showed them how to write a book using Frank L. Baum's Wizard of Oz as a template and then answered their questions. What a bright bunch they were, too!

Which book is your favourite? Why do you write books? How much money do you make? How do you build characters? Do you favour direct or indirect characterisation? You mentioned protagonists but what about antagonists? What are your books about (very carefully answered, given the question was from one of the 8 year-olds!)? What do you do about writer's block? What inspires you to create characters?

The questions came in rushes, arms across the auditorium waving in the air. And then I signed pages of A4 paper for the kids who were too young to be let buy my books. Thousands of them. The longest signing line of my life and nobody from the LitFest to see 'Mr Three Signers' doing a serious session. Emiratis, Brits, Pakistanis, Jordanians, South Africans, Indians. A real rainbow. My hand hurt by the time the last grin disappeared away off the stage.

I do love the dear old LitFest. Really.

Back to Skool - Let The LitFest Fun Commence

I love school visits. They're sort of part of being at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature. You don't have to do them but there's a lot of effort put into integrating the Festival with local schools and authors are asked if they will drop by a school or two and give a talk to students.

I always jump at the chance. I get to behave like I'm a real author and everything. The faculty usually gets a bit twitchy, because I don't do 'PC' so well, but it normally comes right in the end. I try and use the opportunities as something of a sales pitch to get students thinking about writing their own stories. It's not just about thinking you've got a book in you: narrative is a powerful tool in communications and story-telling permeates pretty much everything we get up to in the nasty, commercial world we're bringing up our kids to inhabit.

Which is sort of funny, given our mums always told us that telling stories was a bad thing to do.

Tomorrow I'm off to Al Ain, where two groups of students from Brighton College are going to spend an hour or two with a strange, shouty man bawling incoherently at them. Next week it's English College and Pristine Private School. I'll be testing the surfaces for dust at that last one.

It's hard to believe, but we're only two sleeps from the LitFest - that fine bonanza of all things narrative, bookish and even literary. 140 writers from 25 countries are set to workshop, panel session, chat, sign books and generally delight something like 37,000 visitors. This year's Festival theme is 'time' and there's a huge programme planned which will take place across two weeks, both over at Shindaga and at the Intercon Festival City where the main programme takes place.

The Festival has grown like a mad thing over the few years it's been running. It's created new writers and seen people getting publishing contracts, start writing for themselves and expand into writing for others.

People have been self-publishing books, forming writers' groups, book clubs and generally enjoying books all the more. The Festival has, in short, triggered all sorts of growth in the literary scene in the UAE and even beyond in the wider Arab world.

The increasing focus on the Arabic programme has created a new opportunity to expand readership and contemporary literature in a language that has seen all too little focus on literature in recent years.

We've seen UAE-based writers clinching publishing contracts, new writers emerging and a vibrancy in the literary scene here which simply didn't exist before the Festival started taking place.

And all because a lady with a bookshop in Dubai woke up one day and thought 'Wouldn't it be lovely to have a literature festival?'

It's staggering, really...

Birdkill And The Gifted Kids. So What's Your IQ?

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

She tried her luck at testing Hamilton’s assertion there was absolutely no fraternisation between the research and teaching staffs. ‘Oh. Do the research staff not join us?’

Archer looked as if she had just enquired after the health of a dead relative. ‘We don’t really, well, talk to each other. It’s not encouraged, you see. They do their jobs, we do ours and the general consensus is we’re both better off not influencing the other.’

‘I see.’ Robyn made sure it was clear she didn't. ‘It seems odd to meet for drinks on a Thursday. Most schools I've been to; they wait until the end of the week.’

‘Oh. Right. I would have thought Lawrence would have explained that to you as well. We have a four-day week here. You get to spend Friday planning your lessons. We often have an informal staff meeting in the afternoon to share any issues or ensure we’re coordinating properly. That’s on top of the Monday co-ordination meeting, of course.’

‘Of course.’

He glanced up at her to see if she was laughing at him and smiled thinly. ‘It works well; you’re not going to be teaching a primary or even secondary curriculum. Most of the kids are at university level, some are capable of taking a decent Master’s. But their emotional development is very mixed indeed. You’ll be dealing with kids who have an adult’s learning with a child’s experience. Believe me, you’ll need the planning time.’

The kids in Birdkill are part of a program of research into battlefield augmentation, filing off to the Hamilton Institute's mysterious domes at night to have their brilliance harnessed and turned into weapons. Robyn, her mind already stretched by managing the trauma in her past that has triggered her selective amnesia, has to try and manage a class of these brilliant young things - particularly difficult with Martin leading the charge to oppose her. As she fights for stability, he tries to push her over the edge. She struggles with her guilt at fighting for shallow victories over a mere child, but he's beyond a child - and he's vicious.

These kids are more than extra-ordinary. They're savants. Off the scale intelligences whose minds are able to do things we can't quite grasp. But what IS intelligence?

I've long held that IQ tests measure our ability to do IQ tests. They don't measure creative intelligence at all and tend to favour logical thought. I've often confronted tests that have more than one possible answer, too, which is annoying.

I will never forget (or forgive) my primary teacher holding up a square piece of paper that had been torn in two diagonally and asking me which half was bigger. I looked carefully and the left hand one had been torn so the ragged edge had slightly more papery prominences than inlets. The left hand one, I told the teacher, who then gave me her scorn. Two halves are the same, numbwit. I burned with impotent rage. They're not. The left one was bigger. They're not.

When it comes to a measure of intelligence, there are better models than logic tests, specifically those based on Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences - that intelligence might be a number of capabilities or aptitudes and measurable only on multiple scales. For instance, Gardner's eight abilities: musical–rhythmic, visual–spatial, verbal–linguistic, logical–mathematical, bodily–kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic. The last wasn't one of the original set, Gardner later added the intelligence of the naturalist, which is fascinating - an ability to manage the natural world with unusual 'intelligence'.

That's a long way from 'complete this number line' testing.

But when you have people of exceptional capability in an educational environment, wherever that capability may lie, you're failing them if you don't 'differentiate' - that's the technique teachers use to plan a lesson in multiple streams: these kids can do the simple task, these kids can be stretched further, these kids can be really pushed. It's an incredibly hard job, herding 25 cats into three or four groups all doing something different.

And then there's Johnny, who can do all this work with his eyes closed and who, despite being in the top set all the time, is bored and behaves badly because he is frustrated. He might not be a great mathematician, but he's a way better artist than the other kids. Or he may be on a spectrum, a numerical whizz who has absolutely no people skills or ability to interact or manage interaction but who can manipulate numbers in a way a talented adult would struggle to match.

We're too used to pigeon-holing people based on IQ. Have you taken an IQ test? What's yours? Do you care? Did you care enough to join an organisation like MENSA so you could celebrate your success at taking an intelligence test? Did it make you feel good? I'm honestly, genuinely interested...

If not, then here. Fill your IQ boots. You can leave your result in the comments!

Birdkill, Space And Starting Writing

'What started you writing?' It's a question I've come to dread. I want to print out the answer on a sheet of A4 and have it ready to hand it over to the journalist asking that most lazy of questions to put to a writer. It's like when you get married and want to punch the 50th person who asks you what married life's like. And then I feel guilty, because someone asking you questions is a good thing. The alternative, nobody asking you questions, isn't so good for book promotion, capisce?

I love the story of Prince Philip, returning from an overseas trip, who is accosted by a cub journalist who somehow has made his way to the front of the scrum and attracted his attention.
'Prince Philip sir! Prince Philip sir!' Our hero has a recorder held out.
The bushy-browed figure leans down towards his tormentor. 'Yes?'
Our man is rather like a dog chasing a car, in that now he has his prize, he doesn't quite know what to do with it. He gathers himself manfully. 'H-How was your flight, sir?'
Philip smiles. 'Have you ever flown yourself, young man?'
Our man is puzzled. 'Yes, sir. Many times.'
'Well, it was just like that.' Says Philip, turning on his heel and moving on.

I didn't have an idea what I was going to write, really, only that I had a vague notion of spoofing those international thrillers where our man is chased across Europe by a shadowy cabal of evil wrong-doers, saves humanity and gets the girl. The book would be amusing, only because I am easily bored and essentially shallow and so thought myself incapable of writing something literary and nuanced. According to my Amazon reviews for the resulting novel, Space, I'm also incapable of writing a funny book.

And yet it still makes me laugh when I read it today. It's often irredeemably silly, it makes a number of errors I have since learned to spot and remove from my writing and it makes the, in conventional publishing terms, fundamental error of not taking itself - or its reader - too seriously. And yet there's a sort of cry of 'Yahoooooo' about it, think small boy kicking autumn leaves and you're half-way there. The book has energy, ambition and a delightful way of killing off cherished characters that I must admit I have rather retained.

There are a number of high points that still tickle me pink. The police interview with a suburban housewife who has lost the ten inch 'thing' from her bedroom drawer, sold to her by the gorgeous and pneumatic sex worker Kylie - who is without a single brain cell to bother her - still cracks me up (remember I'm fundamentally weak-minded). There's the divorced copper with a perspiration problem and the poor middle-class doctor who is the unwilling victim of 99% of the book's set-ups. The angriest policeman in England is quite fun, counterpointed by Ivan Litvanoff, a particularly evil Russian spy. His encounter with Nigel, a camp MI5 safe-house housekeeper with a Prince Albert, ends with a most satisfying gag. A particular high for me was black leather cat-suited CIA operative Neon Womb, who has a 'moment' every time she kills. She was my female side coming out. Oh, and I'm forgetting the house-cleaning spy from Vientiane, the vengeful Véronique. Not to mention former French resistance fighter René the Horse, the character who featured in the short story that was my first attempt to write a book. He had to have a place in Space, and so he does. Oh! And grumpy handbag-wielding galleon Mrs Bartholdy...

Oh, gosh. There's quite a lot in there, really. It's amazing what you can do with 100,000 words when you put your mind to it...

Anyway, I'm rambling. Space is free on Amazon.com from noon today for the next five days. So if you want a free copy (saving you £0.99, cheapskate) or want to let a friend know they can get a copy, fill your boots. I'm not claiming the book's perfect or representative of my later, more serious work, right? But you can let me know how it went for you by leaving a review and I won't mind at all. Even if you don't think it's funny...

Birdkill And The Science Of Making Better People

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

"There is now no reasonable excuse for refusing to face the fact that nothing but a eugenics religion can save our civilisation from the fate that has overtaken all previous civilisations."

George Bernard Shaw

The idea that we can somehow shape the betterment of our species has long held scientists in thrall. And yet we are still chilled by the efforts of the Nazis and others who ventured into the territory of human enhancement through selective breeding. It's fine to breed and cross dogs or horses, to transplant trees and splice varieties to create disease resistant, hardier and larger fruit and vegetables. But when you start doing that with people, the overwhelming majority of us feel a line is being crossed.

Eugenics is, in short, a dirty word.

Although thinkers way back in human history toyed with the idea - the soldiers of Sparta were an early example of hardy stock applied to a task, as I suppose the Nepalese Gurkhas are today - it wasn't until the Victorians happened by that we started playing with the idea of improving the human gene pool by spaying the insane and sterilising the less than perfect humans out there. Armed with calipers to measure people's heads and various other dubious 'sciences' to categorise people in nice, easy boxes that conformed to Victorian ideals of human perfection, a number of organisations around the world sprang up around the world, all espousing the spurious ideals of eugenics.

We like to think of it as a uniquely German invention, but it wasn't. The Eugenics Education Society of London was formed in 1907; the American Eugenics Society in 1912 and the French Eugenics Society in the same year. They were joined by the Belfast based Irish Eugenics Society: British perceptions of the Irish as a nation of sub-human, troglodyte beings and Catholic notions of shame were to morph through the C20th into the vile social experiment we would come to know as the Magdalene Laundries. At their heart, the ideals of eugenics; cleansing humanity of those too weak or afflicted to defend themselves against the perfect puritans of Victorian society.

I propose to show in this book that a man's natural abilities are derived by inheritance, under exactly the same limitations as are the form and physical features of the whole organic world. Consequently, as it is easy, notwithstanding those limitations, to obtain by careful selection a permanent breed of dogs or horses gifted with peculiar powers of running, or of doing anything else, so it would be quite practicable to produce a highly gifted race of men by judicious marriages during several consecutive generations.

Introduction to Hereditary Genius by Francis Galton (1869)

Galton's book would have graced the library in Lawrence Hamilton's cosy study at the Hamilton Institute, the setting of Birdkill. He would have taken it down and cupped its leather spine in his hand as he soaked up the great man's words, because Hamilton, too, believed in creating a highly gifted race. With a mixture of breeding, chemical augmentation, training and experimentation into the workings of the human mind, Hamilton's work is funded because he has said he can produce better, more effective soldiers.

He is Robyn's rather dubious host as she tries to embark on her new start in a life so recently torn apart by a nameless terror...

Birdkill launches at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature on the 1st March 2016 where copies will be on sale. If you can't wait, it's available now in paperback here and as an ebook to pre-order here.

Crime Across Continents: How to Catch A Killer

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The second panel session wot I am doing at the wonderful Emirates Airline Festival of Literature is titled Crime Across Continents: How to Catch A Killer.

Moderated with insight, wit and dexerity by savage old Irishman James Mullan, I'll be joined by Chris Carter and Sebastian Fitzek. The session takes place on Saturday 12 March, from 11.30-12.30 at the Al Ras 1 room at the InterContinental Festival City.

Our brief is to talk about how we create really bad baddies. And how we bring them to justice. I'm not entirely sure about the justice bit, but we'll try and muddle along.

Chris writes books about very nasty people. More about him here. His eight books based around psychologist turned detective Robert Hunter have propelled him to top the UK best-seller lists and have chilled hundreds of thousands of readers to the bone.

Sebastian is one of Germany's top crime writers, all seven of his novels have been German best-sellers and he is now crafting a fierce reputation in English markets as well - his novel about a ten year-old serial killer, The Child, was adapted for cinema and also released in the UK last year. More about him here.

And then there's me...

Beyond IQ: Birdkill And The 150 Problem

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My newest novel, Birdkill is set in the wooded grounds of The Hamilton Institute, an enterprise dedicated to the fostering of the talents of exceptionally gifted children.

It is here that damaged teacher Robyn Shaw is hoping to recuperate, an incident in her recent past triggering amnesia that cloaks the events and replaces them with the Void. She finds herself involved in a number of odd happenings seemingly triggered by one of the children, an unusually difficult and truculent child called Martin. She finds herself fighting against a child for her sanity as her friend Mariam rushes to find out what terrible event in Robyn's past could possibly trigger the unravelling of her mind.

The children in Birdkill are marginalised, Robyn is told. They haven't been able to find their place in society and are often difficult and wayward. They struggle with being an old head in a young body, intellectually capable of resolving complex problems but lacking the life experience to fundamentally understand the advanced ideas they can so brilliantly study conceptually.

The truth is we often struggle to manage exceptionally gifted children, for a number of relatively good reasons at that. Firstly we have the issue of benchmarking quite what a gifted child is. Every pushy mum thinks their little darling is gifted and I have seen (through having lived a lifetime with teachers as my parents and partner) numerous examples of children being 'hot-housed' by mums who are convinced their child has that extra something, quite often living vicariously through their child.

The great benchmark is the IQ test but I have always been convinced these tests merely measure one's ability to do IQ tests, not any exceptional giftedness or intellectual capacity. Whatever benchmark one applies, the next problem is that there is little resource dedicated to facilities for such children. A relatively small percentage of the whole, meeting their needs is frequently limited - where they're lucky - to being differentiated within their age group rather than being taken out of 'standard' education and offered programming suitable to their capability. Home schooling has been the recourse for many parents of such children.

It has been a fascinating area to research, I have to say. And there are a lot of kids out there who are being pretty badly let down. Sir Ken Robinson has wisdom on this, with his ideas about schools quashing creativity. Because a mathematical mind doesn't necessarily mean a gifted mind. And structured learning isn't necessarily the greatest gift we can give to such a mind.

So an institution dedicated to not only helping these children but extending their capabilities seems like perfect sense to Robyn, who is mildly irritated to find when she arrives at her new job that the Institute is not just a boarding school, but also a research institution. What does it research? Nobody will tell her. Fraternisation between the research staff and the faculty is not allowed. And then she watches one of the children seemingly calling sparrows to him out of the air and carelessly breaking their necks. Caught in his gaze, she knows she will be next.

Robyn starts to wonder quite what she's got herself into...

Birdkill is available from Amazon and will be on sale in print at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature in Dubai from March 1st 2016.

Birdkill, Books And The Demon Drink

I suppose there is, one way and another, quite a bit of drinking in my books. Space, my silly first effort at writing, was originally packed with smoking scenes precisely because it was written in the throes of me chucking up my Olympian 60 a day smoking habit. I can't say the same for the other books. And while Space does feature the occasional drinkie, my personal favourite is the scene where daft sex-worker and Jessica Rabbit lookalike Kylie discovers the non-alcoholic French drink 'Montalow'...

Of course, thanks to hard-drinking anti-spy Gerald Lynch, there's a good deal of Scotch put away in Olives, Beirut and Shemlan. But it was Paul Stokes in Olives - A Violent Romance who started it:

I dutifully pretended it was, indeed, news to me and thanked him, hung up and poured more whisky into my glass, walking through the house into the garden, where I stood looking over the lights of the city. I went back and poured more until eventually, quite drunk, I held the heavy-based tumbler between my two fingers above the flagstone floor in the kitchen and let it fall, bright and scintillating in the halogen spots as it twisted through the air, shattering on the stone. A thousand reflective shards skittered across the floor. I went, unsteady on my feet, to bed where I lay in the darkness, trying to stop the room from spinning.

There was a hint of sulphur around the Jordanian family in Olives drinking, which provoked no small amount of sniffiness at the time. How could I possibly portray members of a Muslim family drinking alcohol? That never happens in Abdoun. Perish the thought.

I set myself the unenviable task of killing someone using a bottle of champagne in Beirut - An Explosive Thriller. Not battering them to death with it, but using the liquid. It's actually quite hard finding an untraceable poison that dissolves in liquid and I'm not quite sure why my Google life at the time didn't have the cops around with copies of the local pharmacy's poison book in hand. I eventually settled on a nice dose of potentiated chlorzoxazone...

Meier nodded graciously. He sipped his champagne, noticing how fine the flute was, holding the dry, complicated drink in his mouth and revelling in the fact that a lifetime’s work had culminated in this – a new identity, a new life of reward and luxury. The stress of the past few weeks was making itself felt now as he relaxed, a feeling of lassitude creeping over him. He placed the glass down on the coffee table, and Freij reached over to top it up.

‘It is a particularly fine champagne, no, Herr Meier?’

Meier nodded. ‘I have always preferred Sekt, of course, being German. But I have to confess, when the French get it right ...’

Freij sat back in his chair. ‘Lamiable is a small house, a grand cru, of course, from near Tours. Sixty percent Pinot Noir, forty percent Chardonnay. We can enjoy champagne because of the Levant, you know this, Herr Meier? The Chardonnay grape was taken back to France by the Crusaders. My ancestors.’

The champagne I chose to use to kill a man in Beirut was a relatively esoteric single-grower extra brut called Lamiable, which is solely imported into the UK by the excellent Charles Meyrick of Balthazar Wines. Otherwise dependable as they come, Charles turned fink and shared the book with the family who make the wine. They were reportedly somewhat bemused to find their very fine beverage applied in such a casually murderous manner. Sometimes this writing lark is SO worth it all. I'm still laughing, to tell the truth...

Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy had the occasional glass in it, too; Lamiable returned for a cameo role, but old Lynch was on the demon drink with a vengeance again... One of my favourite characters in the book was the tubercular old General in Aleppo, dying his death in a souq that, tragically, events have managed to ensure, at deaths door though he was, he probably outlasted.

The General sat in the middle of the room next to a pot-bellied stove, a dull metal table to his side carrying a bottle of whisky and an overflowing ashtray. There were two glasses, one half-empty. The table was scattered in coins as was, Lynch noticed, the windowsill. The General sat in a wheelchair, his twisted legs covered in a beige woolly blanket. He had withered, his great frame shrunken inside clothes that were too big for him.

The Sandhurst English voice was still strong. ‘Come in, damn you, you Irish bastard. There’s a chair over there.’

Lynch lifted the bottle out of the bag and onto the table. He pulled up the battered wooden schoolroom chair, its scrape echoing in the empty room. The General nodded appreciatively at the Green Label. He unpeeled the foil, pulled out the cork and poured Lynch a stiff drink. He fumbled for the pack of cigarettes and lit one, puffing smoke from grey-blue lips under his great yellowing white moustache. There was an unhealthy sheen on his forehead and he started to cough, a rumbling noise that ended in a great walrus bark.

A Decent Bomber, set in Ireland as it is, has the odd Guinness in it. Pat O'Carolan isn't much of a drinker, perhaps the occasional hot whiskey on a cold night up on the Cummermore Bog is pretty much the only glass he takes. The two Irish politicians, Driscoll and MacNamara, are quite fond of a pint, though...

He glanced at the door of the pub as it admitted sunshine and the clamour of the street. Brian MacNamara’s big frame blocked out the sunlight momentarily. The pub was empty save for the two of them and the young barman, who poured MacNamara’s pint unbidden.

‘Well, now Sean. How’s the man?’

‘I’m good, Brian. Looking forward to the win, you know yourself.’

MacNamara eyed the three-quarters full glass resting on the bar, the creamy froth billowing. The barman slid it back under the tap to finish it off. He laid the pint down with a diffident nod and took himself away to the other end of the bar.

‘Slàinte.’ Driscoll raised his glass and drank. ‘So what’s this great mystery that brings you galloping from campaign headquarters on a Sunday morning right before the election?’

MacNamara brooded over his pint, his keen eye on Driscoll. ‘Quinlan is dead.’

Birdkill has quite a few very intentional mentions of Ksara, that most excellent of wines from a monastically established Château just outside the town of Zahlé. This town, the capital of the Beqaa, nestles red-roofed and splendiferous in the foothills of Mount Sannine. It sits atop the Berdawni River, the banks of the torrent lined with restaurants and shisha joints. In the evening, it becomes magical in the way only the Middle East becomes magical at night. It is to Zahlé Robyn Shaw travelled to work as a teacher, and it was here something terrible happened to her and it was here, in her obliterated past, Robyn's appalling secret lies. And it is in the glasses of Ksara the dark, blood-red spirit of her past is echoed.

Warren delved into the drawer and pulled out a corkscrew. He stripped the lead from a bottle of red wine and pulled the cork. He twisted the label to face her. Ksara. Mariam stared at the cream label with its pencil drawing of the Château nestled in its vineyards, the letters picked out in gold. Her gaze flew to meet his brown eyes. He was smiling. ‘I make it my business to know stuff. It’s how you stay alive when you deal with bad people.’

Anyway, here's a glass to books... Slàinte!

How To Start Writing A Book

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I've posted in times past on how to write a book. I've posted about how to edit a book - and most certainly how to publish a book, as well as my own booky journey. And I've posted a lot about book marketing. I've probably posted about how to murder a publisher, too.

But I've never talked about how you actually start a book. You know, how you sort of decide you want to do it then knuckle down and actually get on with it. That moment when you realise, 'Here I am. I'm actually doing this. I'm writing a book!' is something else. But how do you, you know, get there?

And so @dollz87 on Twitter made a good point today. It's all very well talking about this here Emirates Airline Festival of Literature 2016 'How to get your book published' session wot I'm taking part in, but how DO you stop talking about writing a book and actually start writing a book?

For myself, I had a couple of false starts. I most certainly had not the faintest idea of what writing a book entails. It's probably lucky I didn't, because I'd probably have found something more destructive and less intelligent to do instead. My first book 'Space' started with me writing a scene set outside the Pompidou Centre in Paris. I had a character, René the Horse, in mind. I wrote about 1,500 words and then the file sat on my Toshiba T1600 (showing my age, but it was one flash puppy of a PC to own back in those days) for years as it rotted in my brother in law's attic. It's still there, for all I know...

When I eventually decided to write a book, I sort of had René in mind, but I had to get from the start of a book over to him in Paris. I dreamed up the idea of an auto-manifesting chicken and started writing...

The chicken appeared on the kitchen worktop with a percussive ‘pop’, interrupting Ben Jonson’s rummage in the fridge for something to eat before afternoon surgery. There was little on offer: stale bread, no butter and a pot of slightly mouldy jam. Scanning the kitchen for the source of the noise, Ben found himself looking at a particularly magnificent roasted chicken on a ceramic dish. It was occupying a space that had previously contained neither chicken nor dish.

A soft hissing sound fizzled into silence. The chicken was plump, still warm and its rich, savoury fragrance filled the air. Ben’s mouth pricked with saliva. He’d eaten nothing since yesterday lunchtime and now he was looking at a glistening, freshly roasted chicken. 

Licking his lips, partly from animal lust and partly from apprehension, Ben scanned the room. Just a kitchen. He looked up. Just a kitchen ceiling. 

The disconnect overwhelmed Ben’s response to sudden bounty. He felt like a laboratory mouse: If you press this button, food appears. His mind raced, grasping for explanations like a lunatic reaching for butterflies. This was wrong. The chicken had failed to follow due process. Chickens are born in hatcheries, raised in farms. De-beaked, plucked, dipped, shocked, slashed, racked, packed and stacked, bagged, bought, stored, stuffed, cooked and scoffed. They know their place, do chickens: they’re food. Except he hadn’t bought this chicken, and he hadn’t cooked this chicken. This was new chicken. Inexplicable chicken. Chicken á la quiz. He reached across to the oven and opened the door. It was cold.

You can buy 'Space' here for 99p. It still makes me laugh, I must confess.

And so I was away. 100,000 words later, I leaned back with a sigh of satisfaction and decided I deserved a Martini. Space was written and I could now unleash my genius on literary London. The rest, as they say, was pants.

But how do you START? I've got news for you. It's really easy. Here's my $1mn super secret writer's tip: just start. Get it down on paper, at least the first few pages. Start writing. Now begin to think about what it is you're building here. Ideally, sketch out the big idea and then break it down into chapters, building your big idea in an outline. Don't stop writing while you're doing this, keep the momentum going. Don't put off writing to do planning, but write as you plan. The further ahead you plan, the better, but don't stop writing, whatever you do.

Start by writing down your opening scene. Don't sweat this too much, it'll likely never make it to the final cut, but make a start. Finish whatever you write in that first session and have a think about where you want to take it next. Start again with the next session and read over what you wrote before, then take up the quill again and write more. Repeat.

Scope out a 'writing time' for yourself. For me, it's first thing in the morning before the office wakens (I spend half an hour thinking in the car and then an hour writing. I'll write in the evenings as well when I can. Morning me leaves notes for evening me. I write on Fridays, too. I'm married to a teacher, so she spends Fridays planning. We're happy enough, both beavering away in our study.). You're looking at giving yourself a daily 1,000 words to write. You don't have to DO this, but have it as a target. 400 well written and considered words that resolve a problem are better than 1,000 sketchy ones that leave you with a problem later on, believe me. But if you end the week 7,000 words to the wise, give yourself a massive pat on the back.

Don't tweet, don't let yourself get distracted. Switch the Internet off. Just concentrate on that story, the big picture one, the scenes you're building and the story you want to tell. Think about things when you're not writing, dream up characters and their backgrounds, their stories and their lives. Steal quirks from people. Keep writing. Every day. Even a few words. Keep writing. Keep writing.

And you'll do it. Trust me, you'll do it. Don't bother with NaNoWriMo type deadlines, that's a sure-fire route to a rubbish book and a huge editing job (an editor friend dreads the end of NaNoWriMo because he knows what sort of MSs are going to start dropping on him). Stick to your 1,000 words a day as best you can and just plug away at it.

Believe me. The second you've started, you're on the way to finishing. By the fourth or fifth second you're committed. A couple of minutes in, you're carving your way to success. A few days in and you're a writer, writing. Don't worry too much about all that show don't tell sort of stuff (maybe have a read of this here handy post), or even worrying about POV and other writing techniques for now (there's time for that later), but focus on telling your story.

Once you've given those first few days to it, you're on the way to redemption. It's just like giving up smoking, but in reverse. And that's how I did it: I gave up smoking and my novel became my new obsession.

Just remember the golden rule: start now. Seriously. Right now. Close this window and open Word, take a deep breath and just write something. There. You've started. You can worry about the rest later. If you need a shoulder to cry on, it's @alexandermcnabb. But NOT in your writing time, hear me?

Good luck!

Book Marketing And McNabb's Theory Of Multitouch

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I clearly want to tell the world about A Decent Bomber. This is perfectly natural, it's my latest book and took two years to write, in all. It's taken a lot to get it 'right'. A little shouting from the rooftops is therefore perfectly in order.

I would dearly like people to buy it, read it and - ideally - enjoy it. And then I would like them to pester their friends to buy it, read it and enjoy it. By repeating this process, a number of happy people will, in turn, make me happy. It's a virtuous cycle.

There is, however, a large, green-skinned and particularly gnarly troll-thing in the way. Book Marketing.

How do you get people to buy books? It's a problem I don't have a single, elegant solution to. This has surprised me a little, because marketing and communications are very much a part of the day job, so you'd have thought I'd have some clue. And I don't. Any more than publishing companies do. And, believe me, they're pretty much utterly clueless. It used to be nice and easy, but their world has changed. The seasonal catalogues and sales reps thing is no longer the force it once was. I'd shed a tear for 'em, but you know how it is...

Over the years, I have come to realise that books aren't sold with a single 'touch'. Rarely do we see a review of a book and go 'Gosh, I really must have that book right now!' In fact, I can trace the immediate results of reviews reflected directly in my Amazon sales the day they 'break' and I can assure you positive reviews in national media or on popular book review websites result in not one direct book sale. Dittoes for interviews. As for 'book blog tours' I shudder at the very thought of the device, let alone would I consider undertaking one. Like promoting books on writer's sites, it's the blind screaming at the blind.

So all is lost, then? Well, not quite. It's not that reviews are useless per se. They're part of the wider picture. A reader sees a good review, then hears about that same book from a friend, gets caught by another mention of the book and then, ideally, either is persuaded to click on a link or views the book in a physical location. That could be a bookshop or another book-buying opportunity such as an author event - a signing or some such. I have come to believe that three to five 'touches' are needed, ideally one having some form of call to action, before a book sale takes place. I have often said, the last 'touch' should ideally be from me in your ear as you're standing in a bookshop wondering what to do next.

This is not easy to accomplish. Believe me, I've thought about ways you could do it and, reluctantly, drawn a blank. A halfway house would be ensuring that I 'feed' that positive review back into my marketing channels. What you may find depressing is that if you are in any way connected with me, you have just become a 'marketing channel'. So if I haven't stolen your runaway nasal hair or braying laugh to use in one of my characters, I've abused you at the marketing end of the process. One way or another, if you know me, I'm going to use you. And the fact I have not lost one wink of sleep over this tells you what an irredeemable shit this whole book writing thing has made me become.

So, existentialist angst apart, how do you scream 'buy my book!' at someone five times without them punching you?

That's the million dollar question. Clearly, I've been following a 'content strategy' in building awareness of A Decent Bomber. I've done this to a degree with all four books, although Olives got far more attention, including a 'blog of the book'. While this was enormously time consuming, it did have an impact on overall awareness and therefore a smaller but discernible impact on sales. The amount of effort invested vs returns in terms of sales was ridiculous, one aspect of occupying a small market where scale doesn't really count. And McNabb's Law of Clicks applies, depressingly.

So we have reviews out with reviewers (the first one's already in, in fact: "The plot is complex. You must pay attention. You will reap a lot of enjoyment if you do. This is a great story... I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Most readers will jump on the thrill train and get the ride of their lives. In this genre, who could ask for anything more?") and posts about the book and its 'book hooks' (Bombs, the IRA, things Irish, new terror vs old terror. That kind of thing) have been appearing here on the blog. Occasional reminders have gone out to the mailing list and we're building up towards launch. Blog posts get pimped across to Facebook and Google+, Twitter is, as always, a great link-pointing machine.

We are, in short, ticking all the boxes, using a content-led approach to gain your permission to witter at you and wear you down until you resignedly pop off to Amazon and click on that A Decent Bomber pre-order link. Once that pre-order date is past, the book has to generate buzz and recommendation from people - it has, in short, to stand on its own two feet.

What amazes me, to be honest, is how I've found the energy to do all this again. It's Sisyphean, it really is. But found it I have and as a consequence you, you poor thing, are being subjected to new levels of outrageous book pluggery...

The link's here. You know what you have to do...

Emirates Airline Festival Of Literature 2016

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.

:)