Book Post: I Love Book Clubs

(Photo credit: MEGATOTAL)

It's getting busy with the LitFest around the corner, interviews here, blogposts there. Here's a LitFest blog post in which I answer the immortal question, "Can you teach someone to be a writer or is it an inherent quality?" among others!

I'm scheduled to talk at a school, moderate a session, participate in a panel and, as usual, sit in looming empty space next to someone like Eoin Colfer as he wrangles a signing line stretching to Ras Al Khaimah.

And, by sheer coincidence, I got invited to a book club meeting. Did I ever before mention I love book clubs? I did? Good. Because I do. Who else would buy things from you, invite you to their house/favourite coffee shop and ply you with hooch/coffee and food/cake whilst spending three hours talking to you about your favourite topics (in my case me and my books) and then thank you for coming?

It's insane.

I  attended a meeting of a book club in the Arabian Ranches last night. Ten members, all women, seemed to think they were a daunting sight, but you'd not have walked into a sea of friendlier faces in most pubs or gatherings.

There was quite a lot of curiosity. Do authors have Tourettes or anything like that? Should you feed them anything special in case they start biting book club members?

We sat around the table outside and chatted, mostly sort of Q&A. Everyone was very curious indeed. What started me writing? What does it take to write a book? How do you know you're any good at it and that sort of thing, but then we also started to look at characters, their motivations and what made them tick. The club had read Olives - A Violent Romance before, so I was expecting recrimination over the dirty thing I do at the start of Beirut - An Explosive Thriller (the book the club has just finished reading) but everyone was very forgiving.

I got a hard time over whether Lynch is sufficiently realistic as an Oirish person, our hostess being a 'Dub' herself and therefore unwilling to let my 'Darby O'Gill' Norn Irish spy go without a spirited attempt at skewering me for getting it wrong. Luckily I had remembered to put a Magdalene Laundry and a paedophile priest into the mix and so managed to avoid being filleted. All you need to craft proper Irish characters are laundries and priests. And maybe the odd 'top of the mornin' to yer'.

Given my Mother In Law has read Beirut and responded with 'Fair play, Alexander,' no Irish person holds any fear for me. Lynch has passed muster with the heavyweights and we had a lot of fun with the whole thing. Mind you, if I'd been Joe O'Connor it would have been all 'Love the priest, Joe, ain't he gas?' and 'Great nun scene there, Joe. Don't ye love a nice nun?'

I noted I wasn't asked about my 'Hasn't Mary Got A Lovely Bottom' t-shirt...

Ah well, to be sure. A few remembered highlights, although there was a lot more in our conversation, including lots about my journey to publication, the state and nature of publishing in general and how publishers and Amazon respectively pay authors and that kind of thing...

Is Lynch's behaviour with Leila consistent with 'tradecraft'? 
Sure, did you ever see Lynch employing any conventional 'tradecraft' ever? He's a mess, a maverick product of the system gone irredeemably native. Lynch works because he understands the Middle East doesn't work, because he's more effectively hidden by being en clair than if he went around skuldugging.

Is he a rougher James Bond? 
No, he's the anti-Bond. He doesn't use gadgets beyond a memory key, he doesn't have Aston Martins, he uses servees shared taxis. He's not a loyal servant of the Crown, he's a dodgier proposition altogether. I guess that's why I like him.

How much research do you do? Like the Lebanese politics and the whizzbangs?
A whole load. You write from recollection, but you have to double check every recollected fact. In Olives, for instance, Paul remembers Joshua and the walls of Jericho as being from Joseph's Technicolour Dreamcoat. Now that was a flawed recollection and it would be valid for the character to have flawed recollection except it jars readers and they 'spot the mistake'. So you can't actually afford flawed recollection, someone, somewhere will have expertise in yachts (can the Arabian Princess really go from point a to point b in that time? Yes, I checked every sailing scrupulously for that very reason) or the Czech police (the cars are in their livery) or Oka warheads (they're real and yes, the Russians 'lost' about 180 of them) or how to kill a man with superb single grower extra brut champagne (I often check a bottle of Lamiable Extra Brut to ensure it hasn't lost its potency. No problem, I consider it a service to my readers).

Where did Gabe Lentini's 'castrato' voice come from?
My head. It just seemed fun to have a really burly tough guy speaking with Mickey Mouse's voice. It also helps to differentiate him as, as one club member pointed out, there is a quite stellar cast in Beirut and there are an awful lot of characters flying around at any given time.

Isn't Lynch rather, well, naíve at times?
He's certainly unconventional but I wouldn't call him naive. He sometimes takes the alternative road - the road less travelled - and it doesn't always work out for him. That's the problem with being a maverick. Most of the time, of course, it works brilliantly.

We wouldn't have read this if it hadn't been for Olives. It's outside our comfort zone.
A couple of members felt this, although most seemed not to. That's interesting, because Beirut seems to have attracted more female than male readers, which has surprised me. A couple of female reviewers have been clearly taken aback by the wanton violence and bad language in the book, but that's okay. I was taken aback writing it.

You kill an awful lot of people in this book...
Better out than in...

All your women have breasts.
Yup. Great, isn't it?

Is Michel Freij modelled on Saad Hariri?
Oh lord, no. He's mephistolean, that's all. He's modelled on a thousand over-privileged Lebanese sons of the terrible old men who have too much money and power. But on Hariri specifically or intentionally? Absolutely not.

Did I intend Beirut when I wrote Olives?
No. I had thought of an interlinear to Olives where I would take Paul to Beirut with Lynch looking after him and then manage the other side of Olives' story, Lynch's machinations. But then Beirut happened, mostly as a result of a dream that became the Hamburg scenes in the book and it took off from there. The Olives screenplay, titled When The Olives Weep which I've finished, tells more of that 'other story' than the book - necessarily, because of the way film works. At least, the way I think film works!

Are you doing another Lynch book?
I wouldn't say no, but my next project, whatever it is, won't be one. Maybe in the future. There's a Lynch short story out there somewhere, but I'll tell you about that later.

And so we went on into the night. I had a lovely evening and tried to answer every question or point as honestly and interestingly as I could. As usual, it's shocking how much people invest in a book, how much care they put into your work. And it's always so nice to be answerable to them. Honestly.

Book Post: Cheap Book Promo Bonanza!

Olives AND Beirut BOTH on promo? Yes!

Seriously, guv, I'm slashin' me own froat 'ere.

My first two serious novels, Olives - A Violent Romance and Beirut - An Explosive Thriller have both gone on promo and will both remain at the seriously tempting price of $0.99 (or £0.77 if you prefer) for the next three days.

 Links to buy Olives - A Violent Romance are here. 

 Links to buy Beirut - An Explosive Thriller are here. 

Both sets of links will lead you to the usual places - Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk for the Kindle, iBooks for iPad junkies, Barnes and Noble, Kobo et al. If, for any reason, some of the 'extended distribution' partners' websites (ie: anyone except Amazon) aren't updated, you can go straight to Smashwords.

It's all on account of Ebook Bargains UK, a mailer for readers who are interested in trying out new books at heavily discounted prices - even free! (You can sign up for a daily dose of discounts here)

Both books are on promo with Ebook Bargains until Monday. DO please feel free to tell everyone you know they have a chance to lift these two excellent tomes for mere pennies. In fact, feel free to tell them to tell everyone THEY know.

The more, as they say, the merrier.

Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy remains at its temptingly high cover price. I'll gouge yer in the end...

Book Post: Meeting The Great Unwashed

Olives for Sale! Who IS this Andy McNab,
anyway? (Photo credit: Bibi)

I'll start off with a huge thanks to the expatwoman.com team, who were kind enough to suggest I came to their 'Big Day Out' event at the Arabian Ranches Polo Club and flog my books. I confess at some considerable trepidation about the whole stunt and last night was - something I don't often experience - genuinely nervous.

I've never before sat behind a table full of my books and attempted to sell them. It was a very odd feeling indeed to begin with. I mean, what do you do with yourself? Do you stand to attention and appear keen and approachable? Do you take a seat and finish rereading John Le Carré's excellent and vastly underrated 'The Night Manager'? Do you ignore people and let them select what they want or leap on them and punch them until they buy the damn books?

It felt like a reality show challenge. What a great idea. Take a bunch of people who've written books and then hone their authorial talents until one of them wins through. Like Authonomy with a real prize at the end sort of thing. One of the challenges would surely be to man a stall selling your books for a day.

I got mistaken for Andy McNab twice. The first one was the funniest. He was clearly someone's dad out for a winter break.

"You were on the radio the other day, weren't you?"
"Yes, I was."
"Funny that, you not being able to read until you were twenty."
"What radio station were you listening to?"
"LBC."
"No, I'm on Dubai Eye. You're thinking of Andy McNab, aren't you? The SAS bloke?"
"Yes."
"That's not me."
"Who are you then?"
"Move on before I punch you."

I watched people passing all day, the way they scanned the books. Brits in particular are scared to catch your attention, eye contact makes them nervous and defensive until they've decided they might be interested. Once I'd finished my Le Carré and actually started talking to people I was feeling better about the whole thing and making sales, but every single sale of the day's 25-odd was a 'sale' rather than a 'this looks interesting, I think I'd like to buy it' approach. I worked hard for every man Jack of 'em. Imagine in a bookshop where I'm NOT there to bug them!!!

I'd do my POS differently next time and have a big sign saying I AM THE AUTHOR OF THESE BOOKS AND WILL SIGN THEM IF YOU BUY THEM. I might even have to wear it instead of my 'Doesn't Mary have a lovely bottom' Father Ted T-shirt which did, however, attract great attention. It's amazing how people don't make such small cognitive leaps.

People scan across the covers of books as they walk by, a clear 'I'm not in the market for a book today' decision going on. The vast majority of people simply walked by without a glance or darted a cursory gaze of absolute disinterest. Maybe if I'd coated the bloody things in chocolate.

I had a single copy of Shemlan, which the vice-consul from the British embassy in Abu Dhabi bought early on. They were, incidentally, doing a great job of outreach - the idea being to inform expats of the legal 'issues' here before they fall foul of the law. "Excuse me, are you a Brit? Do you have a liquor license?" We chatted a bit about dips and the scandalous Tom Fletcher, Our Man In Beirut. (whose mission I have so mischaracterised in my books!)

Most of those who stopped ended up buying and most of those bought both Olives and Beirut. A few preferred Kindle, but most were paperback addicts. All of the Lebanese required some sort of assurance that I lived in Lebanon or knew it. Magda Abu-Fadil's Huffpo review to hand, I was able to quell their unease quickly enough.

"The author has an uncanny understanding of the country's dynamics and power plays between the belligerent factions, post-civil war of 1975-1990.... Beirut is a gripping, fast-paced exciting book that may well jar Lebanese and others familiar with the city and its heavy legacy. But it's a must read.

Magda Abu-Fadil writing in The Huffington Post 

See what I mean? It's a neat answer to 'but how can you write about Beirut if you're not Lebanese or haven't lived there?' Glad I had that printed out along with some other choice reviews.

Nobody haggled. It was a binary decision. I want to buy a book or I don't. Everyone wanted them signed. Everyone was kind, interested and genuinely surprised to meet an author together with his books.

Beirut attracted the most attention, the body language the same every time there was a double take and a move towards the book - everyone picks and flips, the blurb is SO important once your cover image and title have done their job. But that high impact cover image, the lipstick bullet, together with the strong all-caps title. You could see it was clearly hitting people in a way Olives doesn't.

As they flip, so I start talking. They're on the hook and need to be landed. I was amazed at the flip - something I have catered for in my covers and blurbs (since Olives, which was self indulgent of me but I still love the art of it, while recognising it's not a 'commercial' cover - I'm actually on the hunt for a new cover image that'll fall in line with the 'look and feel' of Beirut and Shemlan), practised and evangelised in workshops but never actually observed in large crowds.

Recounting a summay of the story of Olives gave people more pause for thought than Beirut - Beirut was an easier book to characterise and 'get across' to people. But a few were more than taken with the idea of a 'violent romance' which was nice.

I would suggest this to every and any author - traditionally published or self published alike. Do this. Spend a day in a market selling your books. Initially daunting, it's an amazing way to meet people and see how they react to books and the idea of books, how they approach buying books and what makes them tick in that process. And what it is about YOUR books they like!

Weary, sunburned and clutching a Martini (natch), looking back on the day, the wealth wasn't in the little wad of money in my wallet. It was learning about those annoying carbon based lifeforms we depend upon to buy our books - the Great Unwashed. And bless 'em, one and all!

GeekFest Dubai REUNION

The time has come, the walrus said...

Saadia Zahid was the reason GeekFest ever started happening. She was running Dubai's uber-funky workplace/hangout The Shelter at the time and we had a coffee to talk about doing something together back in 2009. We weren't sure, just that, well you know, something.

That something turned, in time, into GeekFest. And for a while, in the heyday of social media's initial impact on Dubai society (and, of course, in time in Beirut, Damascus, Amman, Cairo, Abu Dhabi, Sharjah and Jeddah), we played around with the whole non-event - an UNorganised gathering of people with no rules, no restrictions, No Logo and no gatekeepers. Just people, smart people, who wanted to be together and share stuff they were just WAY too interested in to be considered normal - geeks, in short.

But Saadia left Dubai for New York and although GeekFest sort of survived her, it didn't survive the demise of The Shelter as it was - that was the straw that made the camel throw up its hooves and give up the ghost. It simply wasn't as fun anymore and I had always said if it became a burden or too important, I'd chuck in the towel. And so I did.

But then Saadia came back to Dubai. And lo, she got in touch. And she said "I'm involved in this whole container city retail thingy concept park gig as part of DSF. I've got a sound stage, food, seating, areas. Fancy doing a GeekFest?"

And I ummed and aahed. But she bullied me. I swear she did. So...

Wednesday January 29th at 7pm, at Market OTB (Out Of the Box) will mark GeekFest Dubai REUNION. A return to all the fun and sheer lack of structure that made GeekFest, for me at least, so attractive.

Market OTB is running from 23rd January to the 1st February at the Burj Park, the island by the 'dancing fountain' in the shadow of the Burj Khalifa and is a market run out of refurbished shipping containers, dedicated to sustainable independent retail in the sort of direction of food, fashion and lifestyle. It's got a sound stage, bands, cafes and other funky stuff. It should be a pretty cool venue for GeekFest REUNION.

What's the skinny? It goes something like this:

JAY WUD PLAYS GEEKFEST

Okay, so we've been conspiring merrily with the team at Red Bull and they're coming to play at GeekFest REUNION and bringing Jay Wud to play a free gig from 9pm. For those of you who haven't heard of Jay, his band opened for Guns And Roses in Abu Dhabi last year and you can hear his music using this here handy link.

It's high energy stuff and I for one am looking forward to this enormously. I've been envious of that crowd over in Beirut ever since I sat in Gemayze's Angry Monkey quaffing 961 and listening to a live gig at GeekFest Beirut. Now we're quits, Beirut Geeks!

The Red Bull Wings team will be at GeekFest too. Geeks with wings! Whatever next?

GEEKTALKS CONFIRMED SHOCK HORROR

From 8-9pm we have four talks and they'll be kept to a tight time schedule by a bunch of metalheads waiting to come on stage, so we've at last found an appropriate replacement to the timekeeping discipline introduced by Monsignor R. Bumfrey!

The talks are:

8pm Money For Nothing
So you've got nothing but a great idea. How are you going to raise the cash you need to make it work? Not the banks, they're useless. We all know that. From VCs? They'll take all your equity for pennies. What about crowdfunding? Or better, what about crowdfunding backed by equity participation? Eureeca.com is the first equity crowdfunding platform offering a global solution. People give you money, you give them equity. Eureeca's speaker explains how it works - and how it's already worked for young UAE startups who needed cash to make that idea a reality.

8.15pm How Google broke search. And what that means to you.
Getting ranked by search engine Google is about the right keywords and building lots of links, right? Wrong. That used to work, but now it's last year's thing - because Google just broke search - the giant's new hummingbird search algorithm changes the game and means engagement and quality content matter more than links from loads of sites. Lee Mancini is CEO of search consultancy Sekari and he'll be explaining what's going on and how you can fix your broken search results.

8.30pm Social change and sameness
The [sameness] project is a Dubai-based social initiative that facilitates moments of sameness. The "sameness" is in understanding that we are all worth the same amount in our humanity, and the "project" comes through the on-the-ground initiatives like Water for Workers, The Conversation Chair, and We've Got Your Back, that bring the sameness to life. Jonny and Fiona from the sameness project will be explaining what it is, how it works and why diversity backwards is the way forwards.

8.45pm Make money at home doing what you like
It's the perennial promise of freelancing, isn't it? And while there's undoubtedly opportunity and need out there, we've also got unprofessional clients, rip-off merchants and the like. So how can you promote a freelance community of talented people willing to exchange skills with employers who need resources and talent now - and keep that community protected and the wheels of commerce in smooth motion? It's a big ask and Nabbesh CEO LouLou Khazen is doing the asking - backed by winning du's The Entrepreneur and a $100,000 investment round using none other than eureeca.

TECHNOCASES

3D Printers UNLEASHED
The wild men from Jackys will be showing LIVE and IN THE FLESH the sexiest printers since someone said 'Can we print Hovis?' and someone else said, 'Sure'...

Green Gadgets
Heard of The Change Initiative? They're green. They're so green you'd be greenly envious of their greenness if you were a Martian. And they've got gadgets. Oh yeah. Fancy the idea of a recycled cardboard boombox, say? This is something you wouldn't want to miss, then...

Lenovo
Will be showcasing cool mobile stuff, including their buzz-inspiring VibeX mobile handsets and super-lightweight clamshelly things!!!

GAMEFEST MADNESS!

We've got an Oculus Rift and we're gonna use it! This is a hyper-cool virtual reality headset the drooling gamer goons lovely chaps from t-break are bringing to GameFest. It's apparently the latest in puke-inducing immersive gaming gadgets. Apparently there are not only brain-spinning demos to play with but also @MrNexyMedia will be demoing his game in-development, so we're talking cutting edge beta type experience things here!!!

There'll also be a PS3 multiplayer area where people can make complete goons of themselves - always a popular element of GeekFest.

COLLECTING OLD NOTEBOOK PCs

You got an old laptop you don't use any more? Clean it up and bring it along and we'll make sure it gets sent to Sri Lanka where poor young medical students from rural areas simply don't have access to their own machines to use in studying for their exams. I got involved in this after finding out about one such student, then we uncovered another four. Now we have a distribution system set up thanks to a philanthropically minded doctor in Kandy and we can use more machines. So bring that old PC down to GeekFest and we'll make sure it gets a useful - and potentially life-saving - second life. Alternatively, you can always bring those old machines to The Archive and ask for Bethany or Sarah.

FOOD, DRINK, ARRANGEMENTS. STUFF.

There are cafés, there is seating, there is a soundstage (hence Jay and the boys) and stuff aplenty. There is a hospitality area we're not quite sure what to do with yet, but rest assured someone will come up with something.

My books will be on sale there. Clearly.

WEBSITE

Thanks to @AqeelFikree, GeekFest now has a website! Check out GeekFestME.com!

GETTING THERE

Here's the PDF map or you can use Google Maps like so. GeekFest will start, as usual, when you get there (if you come!) but about 7pmish is a guideline if you want to know what time to arrive late after. The talks will start around 8ish.

There's no registration, no age limit, no height restriction or any other form of organisation. If you'd like to come along, you're splendidly welcome. If you'd like to perform a plate spinning act or share your collection of left-handed Manga comics or old Adobe Acrobat SKUs get in touch with @alexandermcnabb or @saadia and we'll give you some space and power or whatever you need.

This may well be fun, people...

Book Post: Twits

(Photo credit: sharnik)

People's approach to censorship is strange. In a country that brought in copies of '50 Shades of Grey' I had someone concerned at my answer to an interview question, "Why did you start writing?" to which I responded, "I gave up smoking in 2001 and needed to find something publicly acceptable to do with my hands".

They weren't sure whether that could run or not.

The discussion started off today's Twitter Book Club meeting. We talked about Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy, of course - but also Olives and Beirut.

What made you focus on Shemlan - how had you found out about MECAS and its role in the little village? 
I'd known about it for years, but only relatively recently found it becoming an itch I had to scratch, buying up esoteric books about MECAS and others peripheral to it but which mentioned the Centre, including Ivor Lucas' memoir of an unexceptional life of a diplomat, which was to inform much of Jason Hartmoor's backstory. And then, of course, I had to go up there - a first visit with pal Maha found the centre, subsequent visits saw me lunching like a little pasha with friends at the glorious Al Sakhra (Cliff House) restaurant which is so central to the plot of the book. It is a truly beautiful place, BTW...

Olives was a novel whereas Beirut and Shemlan went more robustly down the Tom Clancy route. Guilty as charged, but I think (IMHO) Shemlan is more nuanced and closer in spirit to Olives than Beirut.

How can Lynch kill a trained killer with his bare hands? 
He gets lucky a couple of times, that's all. He's not fit and drinks too much. In fact, Lynch drinks when he's happy and drinks when he's sad. At least he's given up the fags.

Where did you get Gerald from? 
He was the result of a meeting I had with a prominent businessman who gave me the "I've been 20 years escaping being Gerry" line. I left the meeting punching the air as I built my spy in Olives around that memorable quote - a negation of a humble Irish upbringing.

Will there be more Lynch books? 
Not right now, not the next book. But possibly in the future. He was never actually meant to be in Shemlan, he gatecrashed it. I don't know how the book would have turned out if he hadn't.

Why do you do messy murders of characters we like? 
Because I can. I'm laughing when I do it. I enjoy the idea that I can, occasionally, shock my readers. If you're not expecting it, the unexpected can be quite a powerful thing - particularly when books follow a 'formula'.

Lynch. He's an SOB in Olives, a hero figure in Beirut and a nice guy in Shemlan. 
Not sure about nice guy, but as I've often said, Olives is told in the first person by the young man who Lynch is blackmailing. He's hardly about to tell us what a great guy our Gerald is. In all three books, Lynch is a self-serving maverick who does his own sweet thing but manipulates and bullies those around him to get results.

Olives and the narrative arc. Is Paul too passive? 
I've just finished writing the screenplay for Olives, which I've given When The Olives Weep as a working title, and it's been a fascinating exercise. And it's shown me there's a clear narrative arc in there, it's just not obviously based on the compelling need of one character and that characters odyssey to fulfil that need. Paul is a more passive player, but he still embarks on a journey to fulfil his purpose. It's just he doesn't know what it is. His confusion shouldn't hide the fact he's got to act to get though all this.

And he makes choices we think we would be better than to make. 
Sure, which is what I set out to do with the book. We all like to think we'd be altruistic and heroic and not weak or vacillate when the chips are down. Which is where we're kidding ourselves.

How long did Shemlan take to write? 
It was done in two tranches - about halfway finished (but relatively clearly plotted) when I published Beirut - An Explosive Thriller and finished subsequent to that. The last portion of the book  the Estonian scenes especially, was finished at incredible speed as I smashed away at the keyboard with my Bose Wife Cancelling Headphones pumping high volume death metal straight into my cortex. It took a bit of editing afterwards, but it was really fun to write.

We talked about more, of course, lots more: about my rejections and why I finally turned my back on 'traditional' publishing and let my agent go, about characterisation and the body count in Shemlan, about selling books, online and offline distribution and about what I'm up to next. We talked a lot about the souq in Aleppo and how beautiful it was in a very in your face sort of way and how it had, eventually after much soul searching, to find its way into the book untouched by the war that, of course, has utterly destroyed the huge Ottoman maze that was the world's largest covered souq and one of its oldest. Well, at least I did...

As always, great fun. I love book clubs.

Book Post: The Displaced Nation

It's quite a neat title for an expat blog, isn't it? The Displaced Nation is a blog that ties together people from all over the world who have decided to live, well, all over the world. It shares the experiences and tales of people who have decided to leave the comfort of hearth and home and live somewhere alien, foreign and different.

I can imagine nothing more fun than alien, foreign and different.

Anyway, DN has been a great supporter of my book publishing endeavours over the years (They're +Displaced Nation or @displacednation) and I love 'em for it - which is why now that we have three books in the Levant Cycle, officially a 'trilogy' since I gave in to popular opinion, it falls to the Displaced Nation team to reveal details of the fantastic, limited time offer that's about to take place globally and in glorious Technicolour.

I'm going to put Olives - A Violent Romance, Beirut - An Explosive Thriller and Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy up for sale at $0.99 each for a couple of days before Christmas. This is clearly an ebook only kind of deal, so if you're wedded to print there's no bonanza - but if you've got a Kindle, Sony, Kobo, Nook or iPad and want to get three decent thrillers based in the mystical and majestic Middle East for under $3, this is your perfect opportunity.

For accountants and others inclined to autism, that's about $0.00001 a word.

The kicker is you have to subscribe to the Displaced Despatch to find out when the promotion is taking place. It's linked here for your listening pleasure. The Despatch is a weekly summary of book reviews, recipes and posts from the DN blog and actually a decent enough sprinkling of international fun and games in its own right.

As you're in the mood to go signing up to newsletters, you can also sign up to mine (link on the right hand side there - it's a bit more random than weekly. Let's call it 'occasional'...) which gets you a copy of Olives - A Violent Romance for FREE! So then you could get your jammy paws on a whole trilogy for just $1.98!

Oh, the BARGAINS to be had around here! It's enough to make your head spin!

Book Post: A Question Of Trilogy

It was never meant to be. Olives - A Violent Romance was originally written with a mild idea of an 'interlinear' to follow - a retelling of the story from another point of view, possibly Lynch's. There's a lot to retell on the Lynch side of things, we have the possibilities of balancing Paul's jaded view of the man who is blackmailing him, as well as Lynch's negotiations with the Israelis and the Jordanian authorities as he tries to keep his young victim alive long enough to fulfil his destiny. And then there's Paul's future - Olives originally started with Lynch sitting in the wreckage of Paul's house before the young journalist moves to Beirut (where Lynch arranges a job for him working on a newspaper) to wait for Aisha.

Beirut - An Explosive Thriller isn't linked to Olives in any way, except its events commence with the eventual fate of young Stokes and, of course, it features Lynch. But that's where it stops. The events retold in Beirut might be contiguous to Olives, but there's no link. And so with Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy: the book's events take place a year after those of Beirut but are otherwise in no way linked. Some of the same characters pop up. Others don't make it through. I have a nasty habit of killing those I love the most.

Three very different books set in the same rough timeline do not a trilogy make. I intended to write a romance, a thriller and a tragedy but most certainly not a trilogy. It's a little appreciated fact, for instance, that all of the Bond books are written in a contiguous timeline. I realised this when I bought them all last year and read 'em one after another. It made me appreciate quite what a grim, sexist old soak Ian Fleming was - I discovered, for instance, in every single Bond book the female protagonist is referred to as a "Stupid bitch" except one, narrated in the first person by the female protagonist - she does not neglect to call herself, however, a "stupid bitch." I'm not a fan of unsuccessful writers (me) slagging off successful ones (Fleming) but I also found I disliked his writing in general. Mind you, re-reading Alistair MacLean had me in a blind impotent fury.

However, protest as much as I like, people keep referring to the three books as a trilogy. Even early reviews of Shemlan refer to it as 'the third of McNabb's trilogy of Middle East thrillers'. Clearly I'm out of step and might as well just go with the flow. It's either that or write a fourth Lynch book just to prove everyone wrong and I'm not about to do that.

In the meantime, on the offchance you haven't got around to doing it, here's the link to buy Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy in print or as an ebook. If you want to start reading the trilogy with Olives - A Violent Romance, that's linked here. And then Beirut - An Explosive Thriller is to be found over here. See? Three clicks and you're away!

No, no, it's fine. My pleasure. It's nothing, really.

The ExpatWoman Festive Family Fair. Oh Yeah.

UPDATE

With rain forecast for Dubai tomorrow (Saturday) and no indoor venue available, the ExpatWoman Family Fair has been rescheduled to Jan 25th (the next sensible date to hold it). So I won't be signing books and refusing to wear a Santa hat, but will provide more info nearer the rescheduled date.

UPDATE 2 
(Saturday evening)
Unbelievable. Not a drop of rain fell all day. Some fluffy clouds, a couple of darker ones, but no rain at all or even realistic chance of rain. EW took the right decision - given the forecast - for sure, but how could the forecast have been so signally wrong? Damn the weatherman!

Trips off the old tongue, don't it? This Saturday - the 23rd November - will see ExpatWoman.com hosting their annual festive shindig at Dubai's Polo & Equestrian Club, opposite Arabian Ranches. Not normally something I'd be burbling about on the blog, but there's something special in store for visitors this year.

Oh yes.

From 10.30am to 4.30pm, you have the opportunity to visit Santa's Grotto, get the kids face painted and visit various stalls selling festive femed crafts and goodies. There's a petting zoo, so little Johnny has the chance to get savagely mauled by a Chinchilla. In short, it's the usual Craggy Island deal including, we can only hope, a goat stuck in the Ferris wheel. Except, of course, it's on a Dubai scale, with nigh on a hundred stalls and a polo match thrown in.

But that's not all by any means. Because this year you can make your way over to the golden podium upon which shall rest copies of Olives - A Violent Romance and Beirut - An Explosive Thriller. These shall be signed and given over to unsuspecting members of the general public in return for Reasonable Emolument. They make, needless to say, perfect Christmas presents, ideal gifts for friends and family and fabulously combustible material for igniting the Yule log.

It wasn't my idea, honest. I was chatting with the ExpatWoman gang and they came up with the scheme in jest. Like all too many jests, it has become an horrific reality. I have made it clear: I'll sign books happily, but I'm not wearing the bloody santa hat.

See you there!

Book Post: Writing Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy

I found a sub-folder in my laptop's big mess of writing folders that contained a tiny snippet of text - an idea I'd jotted down at some stage. It was dated early 2004 and the Word doc in contained no more than:

Today I have been alive a little over an hour. The sea is very blue outside the window of my bedroom, which makes up most of one side of the room. The bed sheets are white and crisp, and they feel good.

It was an odd thing to find in 2013 - particularly as Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy starts:

Jason Hartmoor has been alive a little over an hour. He has recovered from his recurring nightmare and turned the damp side of his pillow to face the mattress. He lies, luxuriating in the bright light streaming through the window overlooking the sea. It takes up most of the length of the room. The bed sheets are white and crisp. Every opening of the eyes is a bonus, a thrill of pleasure. Sometimes he tries to stave off sleep, lying and fighting exhaustion until the early hours. It is becoming increasingly hard to push back the darkness. These days he’s lucky to hold out beyond midnight.

The idea seems to have stuck around, no?

The concept of MECAS - the Middle East Centre for Arab Studies - has long fascinated me. Somewhere up there in the Chouf mountains above Beirut was a building that had for thirty years housed the Foreign and Commonwealth Office Arabic language school - known to the Lebanese as the British Spy School. Founded by Bertram Thomas, disgraced by George Blake, (taken from Shemlan and arrested as a Soviet double agent) and closed by the Lebanese Civil War, MECAS is an enigma and a minor marvel to me.

The idea of setting a spy thriller around someone who had studied at the school - around the school itself - had long nagged at me. I bought books about the school and sought out memoirs written by people who had studied there, life-long diplomats like Ivor Lucas, whose self-published memoir of his career was to inform Jason Hartmoor's mostly unremarkable diplomatic existence. Eventually, on a misty, rainy spring morning, I travelled up into the mountains with pal Maha and we tottered around the dripping village of Shemlan looking for the school. Or rather Maha tottered, wearing her usual mad heels and complaining that I was responsible for ruining her McQueens as we squelched around.

She found my comment about how she should have worn trainers unhelpful for some reason.

The locals didn't think much of being asked about the spy school by some Egyptian chick with a camera-toting Brit old enough to be her dad in tow. But we eventually tracked it down. I've been back to Shemlan a few times now - the village is lovely and the Cliff House restaurant an absolute delight that is alone worth the journey up from Beirut. It's odd how all roads lead to Shemlan - pal Dania 'Summer Blast' Al Kadi hails from the next village, as did a lady present at the recent How To Write A Book workshop I did for the Hunna writer's club (the How To Publish A Book one is at Dubai's Dar Al Adab on the 2nd November). Choueifat is just down the road, the home of the school that brought Sarah out to the UAE first in 1988. And Shemlan was home to Philip Hitti, the author of 'History of the Arabs' - a book I have long revered.

I had actually started writing Shemlan just before I published Olives - A Violent Romance. The book was shelved, paused about halfway through, while I got publishing Olives and Beirut out of my system. Originally called Hartmoor, the title was quickly changed when I discovered Sarah Ferguson's 'planned' historical novel of the same name was scheduled to publish in 2015. Having sent Beirut bobbing into the wide open sea last year, I took up the reins on Shemlan again earlier this year and finished the novel in a mad burst of frenetic activity, pumped on death metal and alternately smacked down by Arvo Pärt like a twisted druggie shredded by a mouthful of French Blues chased down with slugs of chilled vodka and warm dark rum.

And just in case you're interested, yes - I do know precisely what that feels like...

The story of Shemlan was, from an early stage, fated to travel to Estonia. We went to Tallinn for a magical week a couple of years back and I dragged Sarah across town to the British Embassy so I could photograph it for use in the book later - as it turns out, Lynch never does go to the Embassy to fall out with the ambassador in the final version of the book and so I didn't need the Embassy at all, but you can never be too careful.

Sadly, the other major location for Shemlan was Aleppo and the marvellous C14th Ottoman souk has been destroyed. In the overall devastation the last two years have brought, the loss is a small one, I know.

An odd footnote of interest to absolutely nobody but me is that the Urfalees church of St George's in Aleppo was somewhere you could still hear very early plainchant - the root of all European music lived on in the preserved practice of the Urfalees community. I use the past tense only because I don't know if it - and they - are still there. The little green orthodox church (Estonia is the most secular country in Europe - you don't get a lot of working churches there!) down by the port in Tallinn is also somewhere you can hear Estonian Orthodox singing, a rare and beautiful sound that is not only similar to the haunting echoes of Aleppo, but also the inspiration for Pärt's sparse, spine-tingling music. And it was to the aching soundscape of his 'Fur Alina' I finished writing Shemlan.

Book Post - Something For The Weekend

(Photo credit: dsearls)

This is just a note, really, not a post as such. So please don't feel cheated or anything.

It's for those of you what has read Olives - A Violent Romance or Beirut - An Explosive Thriller and not got around to reviewing them on amazon.com or amazon.co.uk.

I wonder if I could prevail upon you to do so this weekend? A sort of thing to add to your things to do list. It needn't be a very big thing, but I would truly appreciate your candid assessment - there's no need to sugar coat it or anything, a review is a review. I won't hate you if you didn't like one of my books. Honestly. I've linked the .co.uk versions in the titles above.

But reviews - particularly for Beirut, which didn't get the promotional whirlwind Olives did (basically because I was exhausted by then) - are really an important part of how people buy books these days. And I could do with a few more.

If you've already read and reviewed them, please take no action but accept my thanks. This post will self-explode in a short time.

Ithankyou.

Book Post - Stuck

(Photo credit: NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center)

It's an odd place to be in. Having finished Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy, I'm having the odd potter with the manuscript, tidying a sentence here, clearing up a point there and adding little dashes of colour where that seems the right thing to do.

But if I tell the truth, I'm sort of marking time. It needs to go off for editing now, but I'm still waiting for one agent's feedback before I give up - again - on 'traditional' publishing. I'm reconciled to the fact that Middle Eastern spy thrillers are not going to sell to a UK publisher.

Which begs the question, what to write next? It's probably not going to be a Middle East spy thriller, given events so far. It's been great that loads of people have enjoyed Olives and Beirut, but 'loads' is relative and it hasn't added up to more than break-even with the project so far - and certainly isn't going to pay to have Shemlan printed. I'm still down a few thousand dollars on the deal. In fact, the only people who've made money so far have been the editors, printers and distributors.

Which makes one of us pretty dumb. And there are no prizes for guessing who's wearing donkey ears around here.

So what to write next? I know I will write a new book - it's already killing me that I haven't started. I've got a number of projects jostling for attention. A retired IRA bomber who's blackmailed out of his rest by modern day terrorists. A psychological thriller based around a damaged woman with amnesia, a whistleblower and a battlefield drug trial that's gone horribly wrong. And, oddly, an allegorical comedy based around a logical man's battle with authority are among the candidates that are banging around in my head like dodgems in a power surge.

The result of which is I'm stuck. I literally don't know what to do next. I've never had writers' block, but now I've got something worse - book block.

The answer might be to start on a romantic comedy or a vampire fantasy or something more 'commercial'. Trouble is, of course, neither I nor the publishing industry really knows what's 'commercial'...

In the meantime, I guess I'll just carry on tinkering.

No Book Plugs Today, Then...

Beirut (Photo credit: Miss Lady Lee)

One of my many odd little habits is having a window on my TweetDeck dedicated to the hashtag #Beirut, on account of my having written and published a book of that name. Once again today it caught my eye as the usually lazy pace of tweets with that hashtag changed and tweets started falling at a rate of knots. Sure enough, it wasn't on account of good news.

A large car bomb had gone off in Dahieh, straight away dubbed a 'Hezbollah stronghold'. Dahieh (or however you want to spell it) is the southern suburb of Beirut, a sprawl that spreads either side of the airport road. Its population is, sure enough, in the majority Shia. And so the slumbering giant of Lebanese sectarianism is prodded once again awake and we can only stand aside and hope that tempers hold, that people don't lash out in revenge and that Lebanon's increasingly febrile peace is maintained. Already Saad Hariri has blamed Israel. Others are looking for anyone to blame. A shocking start to Ramadan.

It's a blessing and a curse that hashtag. I was just finishing a long peroration on how sexy the city was for the Beirut - An Explosive Thriller website last year when I saw the immortal tweet, "What the f*ck was that?" which triggered the wave of news breaking on #Beirut about the huge Ashrafiyeh bomb. Now it's happening all over again. Eighteen hurt, forty dead, 38 wounded, 40 lightly injured. The news sites scrambling to get the headlines out first and just adding jumble to the tweets from eye witnesses.

I'm a great deal happier when there's nothing more exciting on that screen than a tweet from me about buying my book or sharing a review or some other inanity. A slow news day in Beirut is always a good news day...

Book Post - A Week Of UBER-AWESOME Freebies

Okay, so here's the deal. this week (starting today, ending Friday 12th July) I'm giving away ebook copies of Olives - A Violent Romance AND Beirut - An Explosive Thriller. Have I gone mad? 'course not.

Firstly, you get an epub (iPad, Nook, Kobo, Sony Reader, any Android tablet) ebook of Olives - A Violent Romance when you sign up to my mailing list (using the wee red form to the right of this very text). That commitment means you get an email from me every few weeks when I remember to get around to it with interviews, book freebies and other stuff as and when they come up. It's far too informal to be an email marketing programme (I do that in the day job so really don't want to do it in my spare time) but is a way of collecting people interested in my books and books, writing and authors in general. I have, I realise, quite a few interesting writer friends! You'll get to meet them on the emailer. Think of it as a Tufty Club for intelligent adults who enjoy good, original fiction.

You can take a few seconds to sign up now, in fact. It's okay, it just takes a name and an email address. I'll wait, no problem. Yup, just over there on the right, the red sidebar thingy.

Secondly, I'm giving away a FREE ebook copy of Beirut - An Explosive Thriller (100,000 words of mad, testosterone-soaked international spy thriller the Huffington Post called "a gripping, fast-paced exciting book...a must read" and Khaleej Times called, "an unputdownable read for its sheer force of action, violence, and elaborate, lavishly colourful characters...") for this week only.

All I ask in return is that you share the good news with ten friends - just email them with the coupon code I give in response to your signup to the emailer and they, too, can get free copies - as long as they get moving and use that code before Friday 12th July.

If you can't be arsed with emailers but still want to to play the free ebook game and are willing to share the good news with ten friends (by email, Facebook, whatever), then the coupon code is VG69L and you can go to this here link to use it to get your free ebook. So, I cheated. Sue me.

I'm clearly hoping the Aristotelian principle works here - if a few of you do this and a few of your friends do this, I should start gathering new readers from around the world at an exponential pace - a chain letter that's got a week to grow and meet my target of seeding a thousand ebooks out there. And then we'll see what you all think - whether I get hard sales on the back of it by generating word of mouth, reviews on Amazon, letters from little old ladies whose lives have been saved by reading Beirut and so on.

Sadly, if you have a Kindle, I can't give you Beirut for free -the only way I can do that is by forsaking other e-reader formats and joining Kindle Select (as, indeed, I did with Space which is a Kindle only book). I'm not comfortable with doing that, so I've reduced the price of Beirut on Kindle to $0.99 or £0.77 this week from its usual $4.99. You can just go to Amazon.com here or Amazon.co.uk here and buy it for a snip. I'd still appreciate if you could share that amazing ohmigod once in a lifetime discount brilliant book news with ten friends and invite them in turn to share it with ten friends and so on.

That's all folks! Enjoy!

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.

Beirut An Explosive Thriller. The Unloved Easter Egg.

Early on in that most thrilling of Middle Eastern action-packed spy thrillers, Beirut - An Explosive Thriller, we find that the possible future president of Lebanon, a somewhat Mephistophelean chap by the name of Michel Freij, is involved in some very hooky transactions indeed, transferring some $80 million using bursts of micro-transactions to a German shopping website, kaufsmartz.com.

Because I'm slightly sad, I thought it would be amusing to buy the domain, www.kaufsmartz.com and redirect it to the Beirut book website in case anyone thought of looking it up. At one stage I even considered putting up an ecommerce lookalike front page before common sense took over.

Of course, nobody's ever bothered - there's never once been a click to the Beirut site redirected from www.kaufsmartz.com.

Consequently, it's come up for renewal and I'm not bothering. Watch it become the most popular ecommerce site in the world now...

Beirut Off Limits?

(Photo credit: Côte d’Azur)

I wonder if Gulf News gave Beirut's Phoenicia Hotel the option of dropping its quarter page colour ad in today's edition, given the paper carries the news of  the UAE Foreign Ministry's clear warning to Emiratis not to travel to Lebanon?

The warning comes as Lebanon struggles to cope with the effects of the Syrian conflict on its border (which makes a change from a Syrian conflict within its borders, which has also been known to happen), with a large and fast-growing refugee problem and myriad economic woes hanging on the conflict's coattails.

It's a pretty bleak warning as the Ministry is making travellers sign a pledge to take responsibility when they travel to Lebanon. A few days ago the Lebanese government asked Gulf governments to drop their travel warnings - intra-regional tourism is an important revenue earner for Lebanon, particularly as we go into the summer and the Gulf's favourite playground comes into its own.

This year, it's going to be a desolate little playground, methinks, filled with the sound of people playing with that brittle, manic gaiety born of desperation.

Even the UK's FCO has joined in with its own travel warnings. Given, as I pointed out (admittedly using the voice of anti-hero Paul Stokes) in Olives - A Violent Romance, the FCO is usually sensible...

"Scanning email got me a travel warning from the Yanks for Jordan: present danger despite the peace deal, terrorist threats against US and other allied nationals, extreme caution, yadayada. Great. Looking up the Foreign Office resulted in, as usual, the suggestion that Brits might like to wear a hat if walking through Gaza at midday as the sun can be tiresome."

...its warnings against travel in the Bekaa, Saida, South of the Litani and anywhere close to the Syrian border are slightly more nuanced than the Gulf's blanket warnings, but are all the more concerning for all that.

Given the Lebanese embassy to the UK (nice website for fans of the 1990s school of web design, BTW) advises travellers to "Leave a copy of your trip itinerary with a friend or relative at home and maintain regular contact with family and friends while in Lebanon." You'd perhaps begin to sense a pattern. Increasing lawlessness, sectarian violence and the re-emergence of kidnapping as a pastime have all contributed to a general feeling that perhaps the place is a tad less secure than it was, say, this time last year.

The Israelis have, of course, been lending a helping hand by conducting low-level bombing runs over Beirut, an old but much beloved pastime of theirs, breaking the sound barrier above the city and smashing much glass in the process.

Of course, 'the West' or 'the allies' - or whatever epithet the people tacitly supporting the American bid to engineer regime change in Syria wish to use to describe themselves - aren't really terribly concerned about the growing instability in the pretty little country next door.

Having just finished writing a book set in part in Beirut back in 1978, I feel terribly conscious of the echoes coming to us from a terrible age ago. And yet I can't bear to lose all hope...

Beirut - An Explosive Thriller Reviewed

"Those looking for nonstop action, political intrigue, smatterings of sex and violence and explosions aplenty need look no further."

India Stoughton reviews Beirut - An Explosive Thriller in Lebanon's Daily Star newspaper today. The review is linked here. She doesn't let me away with much, although the review is pretty positive on the whole. Clearly in the 'liked Olives more' camp, Stoughton points out that Beirut is altogether flashier and dashier, which is a fair point.

Anyway, if the review piques your curiosity and makes you want to read a madcap international spy thriller based around a "violent, womanising alcoholic", you'll need this link here.

And if you've read Beirut - An Explosve Thriller but not left your own review on Amazon, you can always go here and air your own views on the book!

What Earthquake?

Iran: Caravanserai (Photo credit: Erwin Bolwidt)

And... breathe.

It's odd to be back. It always is. There's a surreal quality to it all, wrenched away from the sunny cold of the unseasonably late UK cold snap and the bustle of family and friends back to the warm air and glitter of glass.  As usual, I didn't sleep at all on the 'red eye' flight, watching The Hobbit (quite fun) and Jack Reacher (woeful) instead.

We got home, unpacked and turned in. And proceeded to sleep through what was, today's media breathlessly assures us, the biggest earthquake to hit Iran in fifty years. The 7.8 magnitude quake shook the UAE, causing buildings to be evacuated - Gulf News found an expert who estimated the tremors that shook the UAE were equivalent to a 4.5 quake here, which does seem rather implausible, but an expert's an expert.

On the Pakistan/Iran border, near the city of Zahedan, the quake is said to have killed and injured many in both countries, although official figures appear sketchy (Iran says anything between zero and fifty dead, depending on who you listen to, while Pakistan says between four and thirty-five killed). Twitter was all a-flurry, of course.

Not that we cared, all we felt was zeds.

Meanwhile, I'm catching up with emails and clients (the day job) and contemplating tonight's 'More Talk' taking place at the Dubai International Financial Centre's More Café. Saturday is going to be busy, too - I'm doing two workshops and a reading as part of The Archive Dubai's 'Day of Books' all-day event as well as appearing on Dubai Eye Radio's 'Talking of Books' programme.

That upcoming radio appearance explains why I found a copy of Edward Rutherfurd's forthcoming novel 'Paris' on my desk when I got to work (the building was, I was glad to see, still standing). I can't say the sight filled my heart with stuff - my last 'Talking of Books' read was Jack Whyte's appalling 'Rebel', 600 pages of awful cod-Scottish dialogue and pointless meandering plot that I waded through with a black heart and weary eyes.

It's not just earthquakes I'm good at missing. Being back in the UK I managed to miss last week's TOB broadcast, which is a shame as Beirut - An Explosive Thriller was their 'Book of the Week'. I can only hope it didn't cause the programme's reviewers the pain having to read 'Rebel' caused me.

Now I've got Rutherfurd's 670 page epic to digest in a little over two days. Worst of all, the book's not published yet, so I can't get a Kindle copy. I've got to read it as a papery thing. What larks, Pip...

Book Post - Beirut - An Explosive Thriller Formats

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Someone just found out they could get Beirut - An Explosive Thriller on Kindle. Whaaat? How could anyone in the world not have known that? I really have been under-doing the promotion, haven't I?

Here for your reading pleasure are the formats Beirut is available in - and, for attendees at last nights fab (if somewhat café-noisy) Umbrella Series workshop at The Archive, my reasoning for making these formats available.

Paperback

First and foremost, Beirut - An Explosive Thriller (as well as Olives - A Violent Romance) is available in paperback from all good UAE bookshops, including Kino's, Magrudy's, Jashanmal and book counters at supermarkets, including Carrefour, Abela and Spinneys. Virgin prefers not to stock my books.

Internationally, you can buy Beirut in paperback from Amazon.com for $15.99 or if you want you can buy a copy for just over $30. This is a side-effect of bookseller algorithms going mad.

You can buy Beirut in paperback from Amazon.co.uk for £8.99 with FREE shipping anywhere in the UK. You can also buy it from Amazon across Europe. Alternatively, if you're based somewhere windswept and interesting, The Book Depository will sell you a copy of Beirut in paperback for just £10.34 with free delivery worldwide. Not, ironically, including Lebanon...

If you prefer to support local bookshops, you can order Beirut - An Explosive Thriller from any UK or US bookshop by quoting ISBN: 978-1477586594.

Ebook

Beirut - An Explosive Thriller is available as a Kindle ebook from Amazon.co.uk and amazon.com. You can also get it from other Amazon stores for your Kindle.

If you own a Nook e-reader, you can get Beirut from Barnes & Noble here. Alternatively, if you prefer Kobo, that's linked here. If you want a copy of the book for your iPad or any Android tablet, you can buy the ePub format ebook from Smashwords at this here link. Alternatively, a quick search of Apple's iBooks will yield a gloriously buyable copy of Beirut for your iPad.

Formats

With the above formats, there's no way you can avoid Beirut - An Explosive Thriller - a paperback delivered anywhere in the world, an ebook delivered to any reader anywhere in the world. All with the flick of a few switches. You can now happily let friends and family know where they can get this most thrillsome of books delivered to them within a few days for paperback or a few seconds in any e-reader format. Or even better, you can go crazy and buy them as gifts! :)

If you'd like to browse more formats and 'where to buy' links or generally find out more about Beirut - An Explosive Thriller, the book's website is linked here. There's background info and stuff. And don't forget, you can sign up to my email list using the box above and get free books, updates, info and other wonderfulness.