The Scatter Here Is Too Great: In Conversation With Bilal Tanweer

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Last night marked the final day of the Sharjah International Book Fair 2013 and the pre-launch of Bilal Tanweer's debut novel, The Scatter Here Is Too Great. The fair was silly enough to foist me on Bilal as his host and we decided on a Q&A about the book and a reading or two as a suitable way to pass an hour on a Saturday evening.

The actual launch will take place in Goa, with Random House presumably splashing out for luxury yachts, dancing girls, champagne and cake. And then there are launches in London, Paris and New York. Let's face it, start in Sharjah and you can hardly go wrong in your upwards trajectory of launch events.

Bilal managed to dig up an ARC (Advance Review Copy, silly) for me earlier in the week, which rather put the pressure on given my already extensive TBR (To Be Read list. DO try and keep up with the jargon, would you?) and beta reading commitments. The book was a pleasure to read (I was its first 'general public' reader as it's still in production) - I accused Bilal of doing the same to the good people of Karachi as James Joyce had done to Dubliners with Ulysses and he couldn't muster any disagreement ("When a dog fouls the carpet, you rub its nose in it. Ulysses was my attempt to do the same for the Irish people") - The Scatter Here is Too Great is a book with a varied cast of characters muddling through in a mixture of joy, horror, sickness, health, youth and old age. It's rarely a book that spares the reader strong and pungent description of a city that Bilal admits he loves and loathes.

From the little boy who is teased for his teeth and called parrot, parrot through to the repo man in his immersion in an increasingly violent cycle as he struggles through life, the book is packed with horror and violence, yet there's also life, laughter and love in there. It's a heady mixture of influences, characters and cameos. The violence is rarely explicit, yet implied throughout the book.

And so we talked about it, about these people and the city that spawned them, the bomb that forms the hole in the windscreen that all these cracked lives revolve around as they dance their dance of life and death. Tempus duly fugitted and we found ourselves standing blinking at the end of Q&A with the audience.

An odd but rewarding week, then, in which I have been introduced to two charming Pakistani writers whose work I have enjoyed and whose company it has been a pleasure to find myself in.

In the meantime, Jashanmal sold out of their SIBF stock of Beirut - An Explosive Thriller and that made me glad...

Guest Book Post: Bubblecow On Show - Don't Tell

There’s a critical problem dooming your book and you may not even realize!

At BubbleCow, we’ve edited more than 800 books. That’s a lot of books! One thing that this unique level of editing allows is for us to see beyond the problems with any single book and look at the wider picture.

That’s how we know that many writers face a problem that they don’t even understand exists.

The problem is… Emotion!

To be more precise, the problem is making your readers feel REAL emotion.

We are not talking about readers feeling emotion for a character, along the lines of ‘Oh, how sad that they died’, but your words and story triggering a true emotion in a reader.

I know this all sounds wishy washy, but stick with me.

I am sure you’ve read a book that made you cry! Think about it. I am betting that if a book has made you cry that you can still remember that book to this day. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if you can still recall the exact moment you were reading that book, as tears rolled down your cheeks.

That’s the writer triggering true emotion. That’s the writer delving into your heart and ripping out feelings that leave you emotionally altered…. Now that’s writing!

If you are writing from a third person perspective (that is when the narrator is separate from the story and not one of the characters in your book, that’s first person), then you probably face a problem that you’ve never considered.

Writers become so consumed by TELLING the story, that they forget that the reader is actually part of the process. The reader is part of the story. They are not a passive observer; they are an active component in the process. The moment your reader becomes passive, they turn off, get bored and, eventually, stop reading.

If you TELL a reader that a character is sad, all you do is add a twist to the plot. What you don’t do is make the reader feel the sadness of your character.

This is important. There’s a world of difference between a reader knowing the character is sad and FEELING the character’s sadness.

What you must do, if you are to trigger emotion in a reader, is SHOW them how the character is reacting and then let the reader fill in the gaps.

If… you write with emotional honesty and with a universal truth, the character’s actions will trigger an emotion in the reader. On feeling this emotion, the reader is immediately engaged with your work on a new level.

In other words, by SHOWING not TELLING you are creating a narrative space between the reader and the characters. Because you are not telling the reader how to think and feel this leaves a narrative gap. The reader then leans into this gap and fills it with their own emotion.
Ok… These are big words, but let me show you an example.

Let’s imagine a scene where a young boy has just opened a birthday present to find a book he has been asking for all year.

Here’s the scene written with TELL:


John lifted the present from the table. His heart was filled with joy. He was happy to see the brightly colored wrapping paper. He pushed his finger into the paper and ripped a tiny hole. He was excited. He peeked inside, his heart racing with anticipation. Unable to control himself he ripped open the paper to find the book he had been dreaming of reading.


OK, not Shakespeare but you get my drift.

Now let’s look a little closer at what I’ve written. In the second sentence, we TELL the reader that John’s heart was ‘filled with joy’. In the next sentence, we TELL the reader he was ‘happy’. In the fifth sentence, we TELL the reader he was ‘excited’ and in the next, that his ‘heart was racing’.
This is a lot of TELL and leaves no space between John and the reader. In this section we are being told by the writer how John is feeling. We are not allowing the reader to draw their own conclusions.

Now… here’s the same scene with all the TELL removed and replaced by SHOW:

John lifted the present from the table. It was a small package wrapped in red and blue wrapping paper, the colors creating a smooth swirl under his fingers. A smile crept onto his lips as he brushed the paper. He glanced from the present to his mother, his grin spreading to a smile. He held the present at arms length for a moment, his hand shaking. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, small breaths pushing from his lips.

The boy returned his gaze to the present. He removed his left hand and extended his middle finger into a poke. His head moved forward, his expression now one of concentration. His finger pushed at the paper, ripping a tiny hole. He leaned in even further, peering into the darkness.

A slight squeal slipped from his lips, an explosion of a smile on his face. Holding the present with his right hand, he ripped at the paper with his left. Long strips came away and were discarded to the floor. A small brown book sat in his right hand. John brushed the cover with the tips of the fingers on his left hand. He stood motionless for a moment, his eyes glistening with moisture. He looked at his mother and mouthed the words ‘thank you’.


The first thing to notice is that the scene is longer. The reason is that the moment we can no longer short cut by simply TELLING the reader what is happening, we are forced to add in description. This is what I call ‘crafting’. I have tried to conjure an image in your mind. If I am not going to write ‘John opened the present’, then I need to accept that I need more words.

The second thing of note is that I’ve tried to write with an emotional truth. I’ve tried to remember what it felt like to receive a present as a child. I’ve also plumbed my own memories of my own children receiving presents. The result, I hope, is a scene that has a universal truth. If I have managed to access this truth, this scene should trigger an emotion in the reader.

Finally, I’ve created a space between John and the reader. I’ve not TOLD you how John is feeling, I’ve just described his actions. It is left to the reader to interpret these actions. This is where I hope to trigger the emotion in the reader. As the reader fills the gap they are forced to tap into their own feelings of the joy of receiving a present. If I’ve managed it, then this suddenly turns into a powerful scene.

And that’s Show, Don’t Tell in action.

I feel strongly that this single technique can turn the most pedestrian of books into an engaging work that readers will remember. No, let’s scrub that. I know that this is true. I’ve seen it happen time and again. In fact, I’ve based our whole business on it! At BubbleCow, Show, Don’t Tell, is the backbone of the editorial approach we take to books written in third person. In fact, we feel it is so important, that we have created a free book to help teach writers how to use this technique in their own writing.

Let’s finish with a little writing trick that can work wonders. It’s called the ‘camera technique’. When writing a scene, imagine you are observing the scene through a camera. Now, just write what the cameraman can see. No thoughts, no short cuts, just the action. The result will be a scene packed full of SHOW and devoid of TELL.


Gary Smailes is the owner of BubbleCow, a company that helps self-publishing writers to produce publishable books. They provide book editing and proofreading.

I Am No Longer With Agent

(Photo credit: jafsegal)

I suppose it's a bit like a phantom pregnancy. Not that I've ever had one of those, you understand. But it was Beirut - An Explosive Thriller that finally tipped a noted London literary agent over the edge into signing me up after 250 rejections for my various works up to that point - Robin took pen to contractual paper early in 2011 and started shopping the book around to publishers at the London Book Fair. His endeavours were, sadly, to bear all too little fruit beyond 14 variations on the word 'no'. It took seven months to collect those 14 negatives. Publishing worketh not at Twitter speed...

I subsequently sent Olives - A Violent Romance over to Robin but he pointed out, much as he had enjoyed reading it,  if he couldn't make a sale with something as commercial as international spy thriller Beirut, he was never going to do it with a novel like Olives. This point is fair enough, but what killed me at the time was how long it took to hear back from him with this opinion. It's actually what pushed me into self publishing - not the 14 rejections, but the fact the agent who had signed me took longer to read my book than any of the slushpile submissions I had made in the past.

And now it's happened again. Over ten weeks after I completed Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy and sent it to him, he's 'had a chance to read it'. This wasn't a blind submission - this was an agent I was contracted to. I say was contracted, because Robin didn't feel Shemlan was one for him. And I can see no point whatsoever in being signed up to an agent who doesn't feel he can even try to sell my work to publishers.

I don't blame him, by the way. I can see agenting can be a thankless old task. I used to get angry at agents and rail at them from the other side of the gatekeeper's cottage. But now I've got to actually meet more of 'em and learn about what they are really driven by. They're doing a job and I can only imagine what it's like constantly having authors battering at you like a malevolent winter hailstorm. Lovely use of simile Alexander. Why thank you. Hardly noticed you'd slipped that in, tell the truth. One tries to be subtle.

So Robin's got a TBR as long as your arm (To Be Read list. Now publishing has discovered the Internet, it's playing with acronyms. How cool are acronyms, eh?) and I understand that. But I just wasted over two months of my life waiting for his verdict and once again realised - as so often in the past, particularly unlocking the little blue door in Sharjah post office to receive another batch of rejections - I was feeling like a Christmas Dog.

Abandoned unloved in the cold, the Christmas Dog chases any passing car in the hope it's the car he got thrown out of on boxing day, the one that led back to the fireplace and the laughing kids feeding him chocolate treats from the tree. I was actually waiting for his response for weeks, opening my Gmail with wide eyes and tongue lolling, panting with dumb canine anticipation. I never actually meant to, you know, eat the sofa...

I thought I was through with that. I thought I'd gone beyond it. I mean, cripes, I decided to self publish! I promoted the bejabers out of my first self-published novel and loads of people have really enjoyed it. I've got oodles of great reviews, done book clubs and school talks and all sorts as a result of self-publishing Olives - A Violent Romance. You can see some of the reviews here or on the book's Amazon or Goodreads pages. It stirred up proper old controversy, it was quite the whirlwind. And opening that little blue door at Sharjah post office to lift out royalty cheques rather than rejections is still a major treat for me.

But for all the positive newspaper reviews, website interviews, blog posts, debates around controversies and cascades of delighted feedback from readers, Olives has sold a total of about two thousand copies. That's it. Two years down the line, I've sold a miniscule number of books. By the same token, I don't regret self publishing at all. I have had so much fun, shared so much pleasure and learned so much, I can't look back with any shred of regret whatsoever. But I also have to confess, the promotion is wearying. Unbelievably so.

Beirut has been promotionally neglected for that very reason - and it shows. It hasn't sold as well as Olives, despite being a much more commercial book. Many readers have enjoyed it more than Olives, finding it a more racy and unputdownable read. Others disagree, which is cool. But the point is, Beirut is the one an agent thought he could sell - the one where I shelved my own feelings and motivations (and, yes, agenda) and wrote a good old fashioned testosterone-soaked international spy thriller. But it's also the one that I just couldn't be arsed to drive promotionally with the same frenetic energy I ploughed into driving Olives.

Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy is a book I am personally very pleased with. I think - and beta readers whose frank and blunt feedback I have come to trust agree - it is my best work. It has some of the strengths of Olives, IMHO, and some of the strengths of Beirut. It's darker, in ways faster and yet more nuanced. It's got a hook so hooky you could stick a pirate hat on it and it'd go 'oo aar'. It's not sitting in a desk drawer. No way. If I've learned one thing from this whole self publishing gig, it's that your work is better off out there than in there.

And yet I still want to give it a chance with the backing of a traditional publisher. From Dubai, I can't get out there enough - I don't seem to be able to drive the scale. I'm not a marketing klutz, I know what I'm doing - I mean, it's the day job and everything. Unlike more purist writer friends, I not only don't mind the limelight, I thrive on it. But the conundrum of how you achieve that scale by yourself, especially from a foreign base (and trying to escape the clamorousness of thousands of other authors), has me mildly puzzled and, yes, majorly exhausted. Tens of thousands of followers, countless hundreds of thousands of page views, reviews touching hundreds of thousands of eyeballs and I've sold just a few thousand books.

So no, I don't want an agent who doesn't think he/she has any passion for what I'm up to. But yes, I do want a publisher who thinks they can make something of original fiction set somewhere different and who will put some of the investment into achieving that scale and reach into the UK and US markets. And yet I don't want to spend the rest of the year being Rex The Christmas Dog. It's quite the conundrum, isn't it?

Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy will publish this year, one way or another. I promise you that. And given the timescales 'traditional' publishing works to, I suspect it will be the other. In the meantime, I'm now looking for another agent.

Footnote: Two other agents have passed and so I must conclude it's not for traditional publishing, so Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy has gone for editing and will be published, by me as usual, this Autumn.

The Emirates Literature Foundation - Formalising Literature?

Can you formalise literature? At least, the process of promoting and promulgating it? We'll see, with the new Decree No. 8 of 2013 from Dubai's Ruler, His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum establishing the Emirates Literature Foundation.

The new not for profit foundation gets Dhs18.7 million as share capital to underpin its work, with three co-founders of the foundation, Emirates Airline, Dubai Culture and the LitFest, the body that has come together around the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature over the past five years. Isobel Abulhoul has been the tireless figure behind the LitFest since it started, and one can only hope the new foundation gives her and her team better resources and backing for this remarkable event and the other projects they have started to launch around the core annual festival.

In fact, the foundation's aims are to:

...promote literature and to foster an environment which is favourable to literary intellectuals through: - Organising, managing and supervising the annual Emirates Airlines Festival of Literature; - Promoting literary output in Arabic, English and other languages, particularly literary works targeting children; - Attracting international and renowned authors to the Emirates Airlines Festival of Literature to present their literary works to the public; - Encouraging reading outside of the classroom; - Nurturing and providing a platform suitable for intellectual output and for local writers, poets and other literary intellectuals; - Inviting selected writers from among UAE nationals and residents to attend other international festivals of literature; - Liaising with the Dubai Culture and Arts Authority and concerned entities to establish a "Writers Centre" which will act as a nucleus for year round activities of a literary nature; and ensuring that the Emirates Airlines Literature Festival is comprehensive and accessible for all.

Those are pretty lofty aims, but anyone involved in the LitFest (and I suppose I have been, in one peripheral way or another, since it started five years ago) will recognise how much the event has done to create a burgeoning literary scene here in the UAE - something that really didn't exist before the Festival started.

Now they've got funding, the formal  backing of the country's leadership and a clear mandate to do more of the same.

What's perhaps interesting is that the LitFest started as one woman's barmy idea, one of those notions that hit people when they wake up one day ("I want to go to the moon") which slowly became a concrete scheme that people gathered around - critically, Emirates got behind it in a big way. The LitFest's growth has been organic and community-based, if people didn't want this, weren't interested in it, then it simply wouldn't have happened. Isobel's passion and drive for the whole thing, the determination of the team of people around her to grow it, make it better (and more inclusive) and create a world class event have done just that.

But that was all informal. Now it's got formal aims and goals, objectives to meet and oversight to answer to. You'd be forgiven for thinking that a tad scary. On the other hand, it seems a quite clear "That thing you've gone and done is pretty cool. Can we do more of that?".

The result should be the promotion of narrative, discourse and the codification of knowledge. The enhancement of a young nation's ability to learn, evolve and teach - to explore and find its voice and develop its inherent creativity and build stories and dreams. A counterpoint to thoughtless consumerism and a culture of passive entitlement and moribund privilege.

Let's see, eh?

Win LitFest Tickets!

Win? Yes, win! LitFest Tickets? Yes, LitFest tickets!

To The Blogging Panel at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature.

5.30pm on Thursday 7th March will see yours truly onstage at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature, hosting four most excellent people in a discussion about the world of online and its role and relevance to their lives and work - the blogging panel. And I must say, they are a most interesting bunch.

*

Shobhaa De is a bestselling author and Times of India columnist, a former model and magazine editor and a well-known Indian socialite and public figure. She is the author of some seventeen books, the latest of which is the hard-hitting political novel Sethji.

Long a consulting editor for Penguin Books in India, in 2010 she launched her own imprint under the Penguin brand. Her popular blog (linked above) carries notes from her life as well as her columns. Interestingly, in a recent post, she asked the question, "What’s a Lit Fest without at least one juicy controversy?"
What indeed!

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Cathy Shalhoub is a little bit of Lebanon in Dubai. Well, a little bit of Lebanon and Poland via New York and Boston. She can design submarine robots, has engineered marine optics but prefers to write books, which is a choice many at the LitFest would admire. Her first book, Life as a Leb-neh Lover takes an amused look at the Lebanese identity in diaspora and was actually based on her blog.

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Caroline Faraj is a seasoned journalist and is well known as the editor of CNNArabic.com. Formerly the senior political reporter at Jordan's Al Rai and managing editor of The Jordan Times, she has also worked for Dubai TV and Bahrain TV. She has her feet firmly in two camps - 'traditional' journalism working for a major global news organisation and working with online properties - CNNArabic.com turned ten last year.

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Boris Akunin has sold over 25 million books in Russia alone. It's actually a pseudonym - his real name is Grigory Shalvovich Chkhartishvili. His Erast Fandorin novels are fascinating romps through the late C19th, set in Russia and Japan and zing with intelligence, energy and constantly twist and turn like twisty turny things.

Fascinatingly, Akunin became a social activist at a time in his life when he would be forgiven for sitting back and enjoying the fruits of his literary success - Akunin has been a key figure in the anti-Putin protests in Russia and memorably used his blog to publicise a walk around Moscow's statues of famous poets in a test of freedom of movement. Calling a couple of author friends and dropping a post on his blog (linked above - you'll need Google Translate, Boris blogs in Russian) to announce the walk, he arrived on the day to find ten thousand people waiting to join him.

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Four very different people with very different outlooks on life. One hour. And a troublemaker. I'm looking forward to this mightily.

So how can you WIN yourself two SMASHING tickets to this most fascinating session FREE? Simply by clicking on this link, signing up to The McNabboGram, my lovely emailer, and answering the question in this Friday's LitFest edition of the mailer. There'll also be interesting book links and a freebie, too. What larks!

CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP!

Why Narrative Matters

Melchite Hirmologion written in Syriac Sertâ book script (11th century, St. Catherine's Monastery, Mt. Sinai. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It's, for rather obvious reasons, quite a booky week this week. I started it by attending the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature moderators' training session last weekend at the rather wonderful 'Dar Al Adab' (house of literature). It was good fun and we all learned stuff, which is as good a combination you'd want in return for an investment of your time!

The week's obviously ending with the launch of the Middle East edition of Beirut - An Explosive Thriller. I've been hearing snippets of the performers' plans and I think we're in for some treats. The nice people at Apres are throwing in a welcome glass of bubbly to get the after party started, too.

I've been doing the day job as well, but I'm taking tomorrow afternoon out to travel up to Ras Al Khaimah, where I'm giving a talky/workshoppy thing at the Al Qasimi Foundation Reading Roadshow, which is backed by the LitFest, British Council and all sorts of other good people.

I'll be taking a room of a couple hundred teachers on a journey of discovery. I'll be exploring my theory that the importance of narrative in maintaining and communicating cultural identity is under-estimated in the Middle East. That the region has allowed itself to be defined by voices other than its own. I'll be asking them if that's right - and if so, why? And if we agree that it matters, I'll be trying to find out what they think we can all do about it.

I think it's going to be fascinating. It'll either be a train crash or a triumph - my idea of a fun way to spend an afternoon. And, who knows, if we all have good fun and learn stuff, we'll have all invested our time wisely!

More information and registration for the roadshow is linked here.

How To Self-Publish In The UAE

Image by saraab™ via Flickr

Here's your own guide to the process, just in case you decide to write and self publish your own book. And before you start with all yer 'yeah, right, like that's going to happen', don't write the idea off. It can all be quite cathartic, believe me.

1) Write a book.
This is generally considered to be a good first step in self publishing. Of course, if you're self publishing a picture book, or a collection of your watercolours you'll have to approach things slightly differently but I'm going to concentrate on the novel form for now.

2) Get a professional editor. 
I use Robb Grindstaff. I've always heard good things about UK based Bubblecow but have never used 'em. Update. Worked with them and they're good/recommended. You need a professional edit for two things - a structural edit and a line edit. The structural edit looks at your story and how you've put it together, aiming to cut redundancies, tighten things up and keep you basically on the straight and narrow. The line edit gets rid of all those stupid little errors that litter every manuscript, no matter how hard you search for 'em. People like Robb are born with strange compound eyes that pick these up in a way we normal mortals can't aspire to emulate.

3) Make sure you understand what you've written.
That sounds daft, doesn't it? But you're going to have to sell the thing all by yourself, so you'd better have properly scoped out the subjects, topics and characters of your book and sifted through them to find the best angles to promote, the things that are going to engage people. You'll need a strong blurb, too. More posts on this later, I'm sure. (Are you guys okay with all this book talk or are you longing for me to go back to whining about HSBC and stuff?)

4) Decide on your platforms.
It's essential to be on Amazon's Kindle and for that I used Kindle Direct Publishing. To support other e-reader formats, I went to Smashwords. I also put together an edition using CreateSpace, which lets me offer a printed book through Amazon.com. Of course, e-reader adoption in the Middle East is still low because Amazon doesn't sell either Kindle or content to the region, which really doesn't help us writers, I can tell you. Because of this, you're going to have to print your own booky book for the Middle East market.

5) Apply for permission to print from the National Media Council.
In order to print a booky book in the UAE, you have to have permission. Importing a book is different and requires a different level of permission, which any distributor will sort out. But printing one here means you have to get this permission. How? By going to the NMC in Qusais (behind the Ministry of Culture building) and lodging two full printouts of the MS. One of these will stay in Dubai as a reference copy and one will go to Abu Dhabi to the Media Control Department, where it will be read and approved or not for production in the UAE.

6) Realise that Dubai is going to take its sweet time over this and send another copy direct to Abu Dhabi yourself by bike.
I am so very glad I did this.

7) Obtain your permission to print
I got mine in an unreasonably short time thanks to a very nice man at the NMC taking pity on me and accelerating his reading of my book. It helped that he loved the book, which delighted me more than you could possibly imagine.

Update here - getting the actual document was a tad harder than getting the verbal go ahead!

8) Get an ISBN
This is actually a doddle. You nip down to the Ministry of Youth and Culture in Qusais and give 'em Dhs200 and a filled out form that gives the title of your book and some other details and they send you a fax (A fax! How quaint!) with your UAE ISBN number. By the way, ISBN numbers mean very little, they're a stock code and do not have any relationship to copyright or any such stuff. You need one to sell books, but that's as far as it goes.

9) Go mad trying to find novel paper, then give up and go to Lebanon.
By now you will have already got a quote from a printing press - all they need to actually print the thing now is that little docket. It's about here you'll finally make the decision that you don't want to use the 'wood-free' paper all the UAE's printers want to print your book on, but to actually use real book paper. It's actually called, wait for it, 'novel paper' and is a very bulky, lightweight paper. Pick up a book by the spine and it will tend not to 'flop', while a book printed on wood-free stock will.

Nobody's got it. It's as if nobody in the UAE has ever published a 'real' book, just books printed on copier paper. I'm not having it - I'm going to all the trouble and expense of producing my own book, it had better look like a book, feel like a book and, when you pinch its ear, squeal 'I'm a book!'.

So one goes to Lebanon - or Egypt, or Jordan. People write and publish books there all the time, so you'll find printers and novel paper abounds. Which means you never needed that permission to print at all, as now you're importing a book. Bang head repeatedly against brick wall and do Quasimodo impersonations.

10) Delay the UAE edition launch to the TwingeDXB Urban Festival, taking place on the 10th December 2011, where you're doing a reading and stuff.
I could have made it in time for the Sharjah International Book Festival if I'd settled for the other paper, but I decided to delay instead and get it done properly. So we're launching the online edition at Sharjah, with an open mic session where I and self-published Emirati author Sultan Darmaki will be doing readings and Q&A and stuff. That takes place this Sunday, the 20th November, at the SHJIBF 'Community Corner'.