The LitFest That Was

I suppose someone, somewhere will be expecting me to have something to say about the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature.

It was nice.

Deon Meyer and Simon Kernick were great company (as were their lovely 'others') and we chatted outside the 'Green Room' for a good while before our session, which ended up more like a conversation than a moderated grilling, involving the audience throughout, which was a bit bouncy to manage but I was more than pleased with the end result - an intimate and very funny session with two seriously talented best selling thriller writers and me.

The session on Spies, Conspiracy Theories and Censorship was enjoyable for me, at least: I don't think we broke any new ground or established any guiding principles of freedom, but it was diverting stuff. I hadn't expected us to be asked to give an 'Arab style' intro of 8 minutes each on our take on the topic and ended up coming out strongly in favour of the Emiratis in the whole censorship debate, which must have surprised a few people but certainly delighted the chaps from the National Media Council.

And then we nipped off to Vista for a few Martinis. Very well done, as always, but I did think Dhs50 for a Martini was a tad steep. Maybe I'm just old and out of date.

They blew my invite to the author's Welcome Dinner so I missed that - and was too busy at the Martinis to go to the Farewell Dinner. I forgot to sign the canvas they traditionally put up for various creative types to scrawl on. I chatted to some people and spent some productive and enjoyable time with various literary types. I sold some books and even signed some. I met a couple of 'fans' which was glorious.

And that's that, really. Bof, as they say in France, bin.

Gerald Lynch Short Story In Time Out Dubai Shock Horror

Would I like to write a 1,000 word short story for Time Out Dubai as part of their Emirates Airline Festival of Literature coverage? Sure, no problem. The story idea was in my head as I pressed 'end call'. 1,000 words (and a lot of slicing and dicing) later it was done and shared with the shadowy and feared 'Grey Havens Gang' of globally based writers I hang out with, for their comments. And a bunch of my favourite beta readers pitched in. And some Tagalog speakers were recruited from Twitter (I love Twitter) to help with one small, but important piece of dialogue. It's more like flash fiction than a 'short' - just 1,000 words to play with means you have to make pretty much every word count. Edited, polished and angsted over, 1,000 words of prose was popped off to the PRs to share with the TOD team.

And then word came back. It's 'too racy' to run in the magazine because it contains references to sex and adultery. Have they READ my books? Anyway, by now the magazine was at deadline and I had an hour to deliver that thousand words so I resorted to an old friend. If, by any chance, you've been living in the International Space Station over the past three years, Gerald Lynch is the evil Northern Irish spy in Olives - A Violent Romance and a slightly less evil spy in Beirut - An Explosive Thriller and the positively benign spy with a heart of gold who's nice to small furry animals in Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy.

Of course he just tumbled off the keyboard into Dubai. And of course he didn't approve of the place one jot... The story's below, or you can go here to Time Out Dubai to read it. Or you can hand over Dhs9 to any newsagent or Spinneys and have your very own 'curl up on the sofa' hardcopy!

                                  Death In Dubai                                   

Gerald Lynch strode through the Park Hyatt’s cool Arabesque reception, ignoring the ‘good morning’ offered up by the doorman, the girl in the long beige kandoura, the receptionist and the dark-uniformed staffer who passed him in the glass corridor. Blue-eyed, his dark hair a widow’s peak, Lynch hefted his leather jacket over his shoulder, his other hand in the pocket of his jeans.

He caught the glint of a camera, a tiny dome of smoked glass nestled up in the corner and added it to his mental audit of the devices he’d already encountered in his short stay in Dubai.

Brian Channing was spread out on a sofa in the coffee shop. He had a silver tray in front of him bearing coffee in a porcelain cup and a decorative little selection of Lebanese sweets in paper wrappers. He had chosen Wealthy Tourist In White Linen, his artfully rumpled two-piece offset by a pastel blue shirt.

Channing waved Lynch to a chair. ‘Gerald. Good to see you. Must be years since you last saw this place. Changed a bit, has it? Isn’t this an exquisite little hotel?’

‘If you like this sort of thing.’ Lynch took no pains to mask his distaste. ‘What’s the big emergency, Brian? The embassy people made so much fuss trying to pick me up the barman ended up smacking one of them because he thought they were trying to kidnap me. Half of Hamra nearly got involved.’

‘I heard. Unfortunate, but then you’re supposed to carry your secure bloody mobile at all times. Even out on the lash in Beirut.’ Channing bit off a chunk of nut brittle and finished his coffee with a flourish. ‘Come on. Walkies.’

A waitress rushed to push open the double doors out into the patio overlooking Dubai’s creek. Little boats bobbed. On the opposite shore was parkland, cable cars swinging against the vast blue sky, a creekside ride. Channing shouldered his jacket and led the way down the warm stone steps towards the decking and sounds of rope slapping against masts. Only when they were standing in the marina did Channing halt. Leaning on the railing, he addressed the creek.

‘In the hotel behind us, at noon, a high-ranking Russian intelligence official called Sergei Anasenko is going to hand you the complete technical specification and blueprint of a new technology they have developed for jamming ultra-fast, frequency-hopping radio signals. If it works, clearly it has the potential to render every drone programme NATO has redundant.’

‘I don’t get it. Why me?’

‘He asked for you by name. We have been very careful indeed with our Sergei and gone to great lengths to establish he’s as pure as snow. He checks out at every level. But we’re damned if we can work out why he’s so in love with you, to be honest Gerald. I rather thought you might have an idea.’

‘None at all. Anasenko? He ever work the Middle East? Come to Beirut?’

‘Never. No connection with Dmitri or Jaan Kallas, no relationship with The General and no time served in the region. Desk boy, Moscow-bound all his life. More a politician than a field man, an espiocrat. Technology is his thing. Hardly your type, is he? Yet after two years’ work bringing him in, we get to the end game and, right at the last minute, he insists on a handover in Dubai and to Lynch and nothing but the Lynch, so help him God.’

‘So a handover in the most surveillance rich city in the world to a man he doesn’t know from Adam. That makes no sense whatsoever, Brian.’

Channing squinted and rooted in his pockets for a pair of Ray Bans, which he settled onto his fleshy nose. ‘You can ask him why yourself, you’re due to knock on the door of room 211 in,’ Channing peered at his watch, ‘one hour, twenty minutes.’

* * * 

Lynch waited for the door to open, playing with the key card in his pocket. He’d taken a room himself, ensuring his camera tracks were linked to the fake ID he’d flown in on. He also took the precaution of waiting a while after checking in then returning to a different receptionist and having his key card re-swiped, claiming it wasn’t working properly. ‘No problem, it happens,’ he told her. ‘Room 211.’

He knocked again and then used the key card. Pulling the door closed behind him, Lynch swore softly. Anasenko was lying on the floor in a bathrobe. There were signs of a struggle, a chair pushed over, a table lamp on the floor beside the sprawled body. Lynch crossed the room and pulled a paper tissue from the box on the desk. He knelt, feeling for a pulse, pushed back the curly brown hair from the corpse’s ear, checking the pale skin for any needle marks. The lamp was close to Anasenko’s right hand. Lynch noted the hand was still wet, the switch on the wall set on but the lamp off.

He pulled the robe up from each wrist, but the cause of death looked obvious. Lynch scanned the room. On the bed was a manila envelope. Lynch untucked the flap and slid the documents out. Blueprints, a slide-bound sheaf of papers. A memory key. He tucked the envelope into the small of his back and left the room without a backward glance.

* * * 

Channing was peevish. ‘Electrocuted himself? Balderdash. Don’t believe it. A waste of bloody time. With Anasenko dead, we can’t tell if this was supposed to land in our hands or if it was just a stupid accident.’

‘Forensics, surely—’

‘You really think we’re going to declare an interest in this to the Emiratis? Come on, Gerald. No, we’ll just have to proceed on the assumption this is all bunkum until proven otherwise by the analysts. You can go home, Gerald. Go back to your bar in Hamra and drown yourself. Take your mobile.’

For which small mercy Lynch was, at least, profoundly grateful.

______________________________________________________________________

Meanwhile, I spent this morning horrifying everyone over at The American School of Dubai. Only they refused to be horrified and were very lovely indeed. Even when I started hurling myself at the walls, speaking in tongues, throwing things at the kids and generally terrorising the class. I love the LitFest. Love it.

Don't forget Saturday's session on Spies, Conspiracy and Censorship! We're going for Martinis at Vista afterwards and you're more than welcome to join us!!!

Book Post - So Wearily To Market

When I finished writing Space in 2002 or thereabouts, the idea of writing a synopsis after having dashed down 100,000 words of prose was really rather horrifying. I staggered duly to my feet and got on with it in the end, but I wasn't happy. Finishing a book should really just be about that. Finishing.

Now, of course, when you finish writing a book it's just the start rather than the finish. Probably as much effort again has to go into finding readers. And they are becoming increasingly adept at not being found, I can tell you.

So rather than putting my feet up and eating my way through the Hotel Chocolat website, I'm sending Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy out to reviewers - a list of a tad over a hundred book blogs being my secret weapon. Several of the blogs that were extant at the start of this year as I sent out review copies of Beirut - An Explosive Thriller are now dead blogs, the bloggers having presumably succumbed under the dead weight of thousands of needy authors sending in their hopes and dreams in the form of ePub and Kindle files. It's worse now, the publishing houses have joined in and now court book bloggers like love-lorn lorikeets.

I'll be dreaming up other schemes, too, of course, including readings and shouting abusive gibberish at any audience that'll have me - I am, once again, popping up at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature as well as booked to appear on radio show Talking Of Books.

As I've said before - it's lucky I'm not shy. I have author pals who are altogether less outgoing and they find this stuff painful to point where it provokes much existential angst. I enjoy it very much. So if you're in a book club, do feel free to hit me up!

Book Post - Shemlan Chalks Up LitFest First!

Gerrard King's amazing pill skull image, 

wot graces the cover of Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy.

I didn't realise until the dirty deed was done, but my third Middle East spy thriller, Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy, today became the first book ever to be published at the Emirates Airline Festival Of Literature's spiritual and temporal home, the Dar Al Adab.

Today's workshop, part of the LitFest's 'Open Door' series of workshops and writerly things, was for the Hunna ladies writer's group and explored how to publish a book - both getting an agent and publisher and doing it yourself.

As part of the latter bit, I showed how to format, upload and manage a printed edition using CreateSpace, a Kindle book using MobiPocket Creator and Kindle Direct Publishing and also an Epub standard ebook (for Kobo, B&N and Apple among others) using Mark Coker's brilliant Smashwords.

What better example than the book I have just finished editing and proofing?

All three took well under half an hour, underlining how essentially easy and accessible self-publishing platforms are these days.

So Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy is now published - available here right now for your Kobo, Sony or iPad and here for your Kindle.


It's a funny old feeling, actually. Shemlan became something of a project on hold after I decided to self-publish Olives - A Violent Romance and then Beirut - An Explosive Thriller. Shemlan completes the Levant Cycle (three books set roughly contiguously but NOT a trilogy) and comes at the end of a lot of enjoyable but hard work.

I'm wondering what people will make of it, actually. I love it to death (obviously!) and think it sits somewhere between Olives and Beirut. I've already had people express strong preferences for both of those books at the expense of the other, Gerald Lynch appears to be the Middle East espionage thriller equivalent of Marmite and the strength of feeling he provokes from readers can take a chap aback occasionally. It's fair to say his behaviour in Shemlan will do little to dampen down the love/hate debate.

Needless to say, one will be having a quietly celebrative quaff this evening...

Book Post - Shemlan On Target

As they climbed up into the hills above Beirut, Hartmoor gazed out of the car window at the buildings around them. No scent of spring for this trip, he reflected, the February rain greying out the scenery. Misty tendrils snaked around the treetops. He remembered his first journey on this road, past the sprawling village of Bchamoun at the foothills then the road winding through the villages clinging to the plunging gorges of the Chouf Mountains. Now, as then, the houses in the villages seemed stacked up on top of each other, densely packed on the steep hillsides.
To the side of the road ran a concrete storm drain that crossed the tarmac as the camber and direction changed, the grating covering it clanging under the taxi’s wheels. The taxi hit a pothole hard, the engine note jumping and a dark cloud left behind as the driver changed down a gear. The rosary hanging on his rear mirror jangled.
They passed the village of Ainab, Hartmoor marvelling at the number of new stone-clad villas, gated developments and building sites overlooking Beirut spread out far below. A blue sign proclaimed ‘Shimlan.’ He leaned forward and asked the driver to slow down, ‘Shway, Shway.’
From Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy

The mornings and evenings this week have been a tad hectic, with proofreader Katie Stine chucking up no less than 230 line errors (where the hell did THEY come from?) in her edit of the MS of Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy and my last editing round, performed using a Kindle, now almost over.

Its amazing that after so many edits, beta reads, a professional edit and a professional proof read (Katie's VERY good) that I'm still chucking stuff up but that's the way it goes with books. You can do a lot with 85,000 words, including word repetitions, lazy adjectives, little touches to clarify points, better word choices, filters (he saw the shiny spoon = the spoon shone) and more.

I'm giving a follow up workshop for the Hunna Ladies Writer's Group on Saturday at the Emirates LitFest's home, the Dar Al Adab - on how to self-publish a book. Last time we looked at how to write and edit, so now we're going to complete the exercise and look at how you can use POD and ebooks to make your work available to a truly global audience. What better example to use in the live demos than Shemlan itself? So I'll be publishing the e-book on Saturday.

That doesn't mean you'll be able to get your hands on it Saturday. Amazon Kindle takes 12-24 hours to populate, Createspace for the paperback can take longer (including the Book Depository which can actually take a couple of weeks to bring up a title) and Smashwords' Premium Catalogue (iBooks and the like) can similarly take a while. I reckon by my 'official' target publishing date of November 5th you'll be good to go and the links can go up.

Boris

Boris Akunin at the PEN Literary Cafe (Photo credit: englishpen)

One thing Boris Akunin, a man who considers his words, said during our LitFest session popped into my head this morning. I had asked him why on earth a man who had sold 25 million books (In Russian alone) and was living in France would want to return to Russia and take a leading role in the popular movement against Vladimir Putin's vice-like grip on Russian politics.

That took the conversation down the line of repression and civil movements, with a dash of bloggery thrown in (Akunin used his blog to draw a crowd of 10,000-odd people to perform an act of quiet civil rights assertion).

"A writer is a thermometer. If you don't like the temperature, don't break the thermometer. It won't change the temperature, just your ability to measure it."

I liked that.

Watani

She was gentle, but insistent. She wanted her views known and I had a sense there was real anger beneath the polite, genteel exterior. She had come up to me with her friend after my session together with Kamal Abdel Malek at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature.

Her family name was Dajani and she wanted to make her protest. I shouldn't have used her family name in my book, Olives - A Violent Romance. I should have made up a name rather than sully her family's good standing by involving them in questionable morality and terrorism.

Did I not know the family was an old and respected one?

I had talked about the controversies of Olives during the session - the discussion around the behaviour of my characters in their setting and the confusion between fact and fiction. I told my visitor family names are commonly used in fiction, that books all over the world contain characters with real names not made up ones. She didn't believe me; her friend assured her that yes, books did indeed use real names. But her family name is respected. It has standing, watani.

Watani is a funny thing. It's sort of nationalistic, a passion for one's country. As a quality, it could be part of whatever it is that goes into a 'good name'.

But this is fiction. It is precisely because it was a big and common name, found in Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, California and Brisbane. Would you really balk at calling one of your characters Smith in case the Smiths felt slighted? But this is not just a name. It is a family. And actually, I think my Dajanis are rather admirable. That's what they are in the book - the heroes of it. They represent a narrative, that of the Palestinians. Pick another Palestinian family to bear the burden of your book. Have you read it? Part of it (this is Arabic for 'No I haven't'). You should change the name. But it's pointless. If I made up names, I'd be the English author who doesn't know any Arab names and makes up silly sounding ones that aren't realistic. If I renamed the family Dalani, everyone would still know it was Dajani. Besides, there are Dajanis who thoroughly agree with the book and are proud their family name is in it. And I think they're just as guilty of conflating fact and fiction as my interlocutor.

It's no use, I'm never going to convince her, neither she me. She made her protest and I accepted it.

The Blogging Panel at The Emirates LitFest

It was always going to be an interesting mixture, the rationalist historian with a fascination for one of the world's most ordered cultures meeting the columnist and socialite who pops and splutters with all of the glorious, random panache of Bollywood. Boris Akunin and Shobaa De were at loggerheads within seconds flat and this moderator's work was cut out trying to ensure that respected journalist Caroline Faraj and novelist Kathy Shalhoub weren't just buried in the fascinating conflict developing between the forces of chaos and those of order.

Akunin's blog pulls anything up to and beyond 1,000 comments a post. It's in Russian, but you can use Google translate to render his words into a strange quasi-blurt of odd and disconnected semi-English. With that amount of engagement, you're looking at a lot of space for trolls and fights breaking out and Akunin, a man with a deep distaste for contemporary Russian rudeness, has a tough rule for dealing with violent disagreement. He makes combative commenters play Russian roulette. Each of the combatants is offered a number, even or odd. Akunin chooses blind and the loser is blocked from the blog. It's certainly an effective way to settle debate!

We had fun. Shobaa is certainly a character and wasted no time toasting a young starlet who had dissed 'Shobaa Aunty' in a Bollywood spatette over a whitening cream endorsement, rolling out an amusing take on the role of conroversy in her life (key) and blog (even more key). We talked about CNN Arabic and its role in promoting Arab bloggers, about blogging in disapora, about pitting yourself against Putin and using blogs to promote books.

Today I'm co-hosting a show with Siobhan Leyden on Dubai Eye Radio from 1-3pm and then I'm on stage myself in what is undoubtedly going to descend with great speed into a glorious hour of mayhem, because Kamal Abdel Malek, that well known international criminal, is on there with me.

And then, dears, I'm going home for a Martini...

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?

A Proper Author

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I'm not a proper author, but I'm feeling like one this month. I've just finished our Umbrella Series workshops at The Archive and now it's the LitFest week of madness. I'm going on Dubai One TV today to record a programme for tomorrow, radio tomorrow to talk about the blogging panel on Thursday, then I've got the LitFest moderator's briefing later in the day followed by the author's dinner.

Flash! Flash! Flash! Sweetie!

Then there's the blogger's panel Thursday, with its highly luminary guests. I'm co-hosting a special show on Dubai Eye Radio from the LitFest on Friday from 1-3pm directly following that, Kamal Abdel Malek and I are hooning around onstage in our own session (followed by - ha - a signing session!). Saturday I get to interview Anissa Helou. Following all that I'm giving a talk at Zayed University on the role of narrative next week and then in April I'll be doing a 'More Talk' about telling stories at More Cafe and then joining a panel on self-publishing at the Abu Dhabi Book Fair on the 25th.

You'd almost think I was a proper author, but I'm merely masquerading. It's a load of fun, for sure, but a proper author would be making money out of all this. I'm just losing the stuff. Don't get me wrong - not a shred of regret in the air around here.

Come With Me From Jerusalem

Kamal Abdel Malek and I are sharing the stage at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature in a session entitled 'Tales of Two Cities' on Friday the 8th March from 3pm. The session's name reflects the fact Kamal's novel is set in Jerusalem and my latest is, at least in part, set in Beirut. Tickets for that session are moving fast I'm told and can be got here. We're both pretty lippy, so it's going to be fast, furious and fun for sure.

I first met Kamal a couple of years ago at the LitFest. He's an intelligent, engaging and thoroughly likeable character who loves nothing more than good-natured disputation and banter. He's also a talented writer - published conventionally as an academic author, he took the decision to go straight to self-publication with his first novel, Come With Me From Jerusalem - a love story recounting the adventures of Egyptian Copt Sami, who becomes the first Egyptian student to study in Jerusalem after the 1979 peace treaty and  falls in love with American Jewess Lital. When Sami is accused of murdering a call-girl, his and Lital's love is tested beyond reason.

I'm still reading it - it's an amazing book I am thoroughly enjoying. Kamal's work mixes elegant prose and strong characters with real 'voice' and a narrative that hooks you by the nose and drags you forwards. It's wilfully different, witty and well observed and, thank God, avoids those 'obvious' pitfalls of books that attempt to give a new treatment to the Arab/Israeli narrative.

So I thought I might have a chat with Kamal prior our session and perhaps take the opportunity to highlight  that today's McNabboGram emailer carries a FREE copy of the ebook of Come With Me From Jerusalem - even before its official launch! There are more specials in store, so if you didn't sign up before, you might want to get clicking on this here link to sign up to the McNabboGram!

Onto a chat with Kamal:

What made you decide to put your heart and soul into a work of fiction after a lifetime of academia? 
I have two answers: one modest and the other arrogant. The modest answer is this: the life of the academic is austere in many ways; he spends years poring over research topics, writing papers and books in as objective a manner as is humanly possible. These writings are by and large of interest to him and at best a handful of other academics, so he decides to try his hand at something else, something less objective and more personal, something that is not engendered from the brain cells but from the folds of one’s own guts. This can be a liberating exercise.

The arrogant answer is this: well, Kamal, my man, if you are so good at chess, you can be equally good at swimming, besides, you’ve got a talent in the use of the English language; glib and quite the raconteur at parties, impressive and attention-grabbing as you exhibit with ease your storytelling wares. Yes, English is not your native tongue but English was not the native tongue of Gibran and Nabokov, and before them Joseph Conrad, and look how they fared! So one day three years ago, I said to myself, “Kamal my man, just do it!”

What is Come With Me From Jerusalem about? Not the plot, but the substance, the essence of the book. What are you trying to achieve through this story? 
Come with Me from Jerusalem tells the story of Sami, the first Egyptian student in Israel, who falls in love with Jewish classmate Lital. Sami’s life is shattered when he finds himself arrested and tried for the murder of a Tel Aviv call girl. Only a miracle can save him from a certain life sentence as he and Lital come together, offering hope for reconciliation and a shared future.

So what does this really mean? As an Arab novel, Come with Me from Jerusalem is unique in many ways. It is perhaps the first novel by an Egyptian author which presents a Christian Copt and a Jewish woman as the main characters; minority figures are all of a sudden placed in the center of action, in the spotlight of drama. The setting is Jerusalem, not Cairo or Alexandria, not an Egyptian village or an oasis, and in the novel Jerusalem is viewed in a different light, not as a holy city but as a livable city with streets and cafes and rundown houses with TV antennas burgeoning on their roofs like alfalfa sprouts.

Besides, Sami and Lital, lovers from opposite sides of the conflict, are ideally placed to constitute a microcosm representing divergent views of the Arab-Jewish conflict and the desire to achieve genuine reconciliation.

Come With Me From Jerusalem is about an Egyptian in love with an Israeli. Now you've lit the blue touch paper, how far back do you intend to stand? 
Technically, Lital, Sami’s beloved, is not Israeli but a Jewish-American woman planning to immigrate to Israel. Well, now that I’ve lit the blue touch paper, I intend to stand as far back as I can. This is bound to be a huge explosion, figuratively speaking, of course. In our Arab world we are not used to reading novels in which a Jewish or Israeli character is a real flesh-and-blood human being with feelings, let alone an object of love and sympathy. There is something disarming about a reference to a handicapped Israeli child. Have we Arabs ever thought that an Israeli can be handicapped? We are more used to him as a predatory soldier, an aggressive land-grabbing settler, a religious fanatic of one stripe or another. But a handicapped child? So I better get myself a good medical insurance policy because the explosion is bound to be a huge hellhole. 

There's a danger of 'conflict fatigue' with Arab/Israeli conflict books. Having read Come With Me From Jerusalem, I know this is a vividly original, smart and fascinating story. How are you going to get over that 'oh, another Middle East Arab/Israeli book' attitude? 
I stand by my work of fiction. I pitch it to the readers and let them decide. I say “Listen folks, this is not part of the usual stuff written about the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is first and mainly a love story.”

“Hatred stirreth up strife;” the Bible tells us, “but love covereth all sins,” (Proverbs 10:12)

Arabic literature has produced a scant volume of works of fiction dealing with the sensitive topic of interethnic and interreligious liaisons. The most celebrated love story between a Palestinian man and a Jewish-Israeli woman is the story of Palestine’s national poet Mahmud Darwish and his Jewish beloved, named “Rita” in some of his poems. I find it strange that Arab audiences in musical festivals such as the one in Jarash, in Jordan, would listen with rapture to the tuneful song “Rita” as sung by the Lebanese Marcel Khalifeh, and not show awareness that the “Rita” of the song is really a Jewish-Israeli beloved and that their rapture is focused on the taboo love between a Muslim-Palestinian and a Jewish-Israeli. Can love conquer all, really? Well, I urge readers out there in the real or virtual world of cyberspace to read Come With Me From Jerusalem and judge.

You're the professor of Arabic Literature at AUD, so your deep literary expertise is rooted in Arabic. How did you manage to write a novel in English - and why English not Arabic? 
Arabic is my mother tongue but English is my step-mother tongue. In the world of languages, and as it happened in my case, step-mothers can be and at times are kinder and more affectionate. We don’t choose our mother tongues, do we? They’re imposed on us; they are like our names and our facial features. Like a mother, our mother tongue often yells at us; she’d wag her figure in our face and harshly reprimand us when we make mistakes, when we use the wrong end-vowel, when we replace the nominative noun with the accusative, when our verbs are in the jussive instead of the subjunctive.

But step-mother tongues? They may be at times introduced to us as part of our school curriculum but to continue to live with them and to adopt them as our own mother tongues is a voluntary act. We do this of our own accord, as an act of volition, an act of love. I am speaking for myself here but I bet you 1001 Emirati Dirhams that writers whose step-mother tongue was English must have felt the same way, writers like the Polish Joseph Conrad, the Lebanese Gibran, and the Russian Nabokov, or the Egyptian Ahdaf Soueif.

You're a published author of non-fiction works in your academic capacity - did your work on Arab/Israeli literary portrayal inform the way you managed the characters and their interplay in Come With Me From Jerusalem? 
Undoubtedly. How people from different cultural backgrounds relate to one another without losing their authentic selves is what has preoccupied my scholarly and fictional work alike. America in an Arab Mirror: Images of America in Arabic Travel Literature, 1688 to 9/11 and Beyond (2011), examines Arab images of America: the unchanging Other, the very antithesis of the Arab Self; the seductive female; the Other that has praiseworthy and reprehensible elements, some to reject, others to appropriate.

But my passionate interest is in the historical and cultural encounters between Arabs and Jews as depicted in literature and the cinematic art. You could say that The Rhetoric of Violence: Arab-Jewish Encounters in Contemporary Palestinian Literature and Film (2005) was a prelude to my fictional work, Come with Me from Jerusalem, in which I tell a story of star-crossed lovers caught up in the vortex of Arab-Israeli conflict.

As I mentioned, you're already conventionally published. Did you look for agents and publishers or go straight to self publishing? And why? 
Finding publishers for one’s academic work is far easier than for one’s creative writing. I think that some literary agents out there are darn harsh in their prejudgment of authors’ samples, sending off rejection letters as cowboys shoot from the hip in a Western movie. It is time to challenge these guys whose agencies have become virtual abortion clinic for literary talents.

Have you ever seen their storage areas of rejected MSs? A graveyard of human creativity as a result of wanton death sentences, uttered in the absence of jury and the city folks. I say it is time to revolt against this oppressive oligarchy. Time for the Authors’ Spring! Let my outcry here be the first drum-roll in our holy crusade against the talent-abortionists.

What are your hopes for the book? And are you truly ready for the controversy? 
Will there be controversy surrounding my novel? No doubt and I say Ahlan wa Sahlan! I am ready with my bullet-proof jacket and my helmet, and my F-16 fighter plane is being now equipped with laser-guided verbal missiles. So this is a fair warning to the Tatars at my city gates. So much for war and battlefields.

On a happier and more optimistic note this is what I want to add: I used to say to my erstwhile beloved, “My sweet kattousa, ‘lana l-ghadu wa l-mustaqbalu l-wa’du’ - Tomorrow is ours; we are bound for glory!” Ever since I watched this wonderful movie, “Bound for Glory” about the life of singer Woody Guthrie, I’ve always felt it in my guts that someday, somewhere somehow there’s going to be a dramatic turn-up, a big breakthrough in my fortunes. This book is bound for glory because it is an eloquent dream of a brave new world where love rules as a supreme but benevolent sovereign.

GET YOUR COPY NOW!

Come With Me From Jerusalem is available from amazon.com as both a Kindle book and printed book and also from Smashwords for iPads, Android tabs and other ebook readers. It'll soon be available on other platforms such as Kobo and iBooks and a UAE print edition will be available in stores soon. If you've got $95 going free, you might be interested in Kamal's 'Rhetoric of Violence' or for a mere $105, his America in an Arab Mirror.

If you're REALLY fast and sign up to the McNabboGram today, you might be in time to get today's mailer and get Come With Me From Jerusalem for FREE! :)

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.

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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!

The Umbrella Series At The Archive

The Umbrella Series - four workshops on the creation and distribution of words - takes place at The Archive on Wednesdays throughout February. They're being held by The Archive in conjunction with The Emirates Literary Group, with the intention of providing information and guidance for budding writers on the process of collating words into complete works, how to create books out of them (either through the 'traditional' process or self publishing) and how to sell and distribute them. With that in mind, the four workshops feature a known idiot, a poet and the head of a book distribution and sales company.

The idea is that attendees will walk away from these with a reasonable basic understanding of the whole process that will stand them in good stead as they undertake their own journey to publication. It's the workshop I wish I'd had being held in a funky work/art-space around the corner from me as I started out myself.

By the way, in doing these I'm not claiming I'm Stephen King or that I am anything other than a marginal, self-published writer selling handfuls of books. I'm just sharing some of the lessons I learned the hard way, so you don't have to.

Each workshop session will last a couple of hours and take place from 6-pm. Attendance is free, but The Archive would appreciate if you register to guarantee a place.

How to write a book 
Alexander McNabb
February 6th
I'll be looking at the miraculous process of arranging 26 letters variously into 100,000 words and how you go about doing that without wasting time, effort and money. We'll look at things like plotting, dialogue, structure and editing.

How to write poetry 
Frank Dullaghan
February 13th
Published and widely respected poet Frank Dullaghan will be guiding attendees through the world of poetry - looking at different poetic forms and styles and how to use language to create evocation, to bring rhythm and metre together on the page so the words create an emotional experience for the reader. He'll also be looking at finding outlets for your poetry.

Routes to publication (How to find an agent or self publish your book) 
Alexander McNabb
February 20th
Luigi Bonomi gave an excellent - and popular - workshop at the Emirates LitFest last year and will be repeating it this year. He is a top London literary agent and a very nice chap indeed and his excellent advice is well worth heeding. So do book for that session, but feel free to come along to this one as well. I'll be giving an author's-eye view of the agenting and publishing process, from how to format your manuscript through creating a stellar synopsis, blistering blurb and killer query. I'll also be looking at how you can chuck all that up and do it yourself, from picking platforms through to getting reviews and promoting your work.

Book distribution and sales in the UAE 
Narain Jashanmal
February 27th
If you want to understand how publishing 'ticks', who better to talk to than an industry 'insider'? It's amazing how many of us set out to put 100,000 words on paper without ever thinking about what's actually going to happen to them at the end of the process. Narain Jashanmal is GM of Jashanmal Books and will take you on a roller coaster ride through the worlds of distribution, sales and retail. What do the public want? How do they get it? What makes people buy (and not buy!) books? What can you do to maximise your chances of success and give his sales team a nice, easy job when it comes to actually getting your books out there into peoples' hands? And where is publishing going - and where should we as writers be going as a result?

So there you have it - a series of what promise to be enjoyable evenings for anyone interested in writing and publishing as we embark on the run-up to the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature - the link will take you to my sessions at the LitFest. :)

For the Umbrella Series Workshops, please let Librarian Sarah Malki know which sessions you'd like to attend. You can drop her a mail at sarah@thearchive.ae or phone The Archive on 04 349 4033. If you want its location, pop over to www.thearchive.ae or this post if you want to find out more about The Archive.

A Very Literary Fellow

I'm going to be infesting The Emirates Airline Festival of Literature again this year. For the first time, I'm on the main programme, so I'll have the smoking jacket, cravat and a Sobranie in an ebonite holder.

On Thursday 7th March at 5.30pm, I'm moderating The Blogging Panel and will be joined onstage by some pretty heavyweight blogging types: social commentator, writer and journalist Shobhaa De, Russian crime fiction writer and social activist Boris Akunin, CNN journalist Caroline Faraj and locally-based newly-published author Kathy Shalhoub. For your Dhs60, you'll get an hour of insight into why these people bother with blogs, heated debate about the nature and changing role of media and, if I have anything to do with it, some troublemaking. I have the distinct feeling there'll be drinks afterwards...

On Friday 8th March from 3-4pm, I'll be onstage with Egyptian author of Come With Me From Jerusalem Kamal Abdel-Malek, talking about our Tales of Two Cities (I'll be blethering about Beirut - An Explosive Thriller, of course). We're both chatty, engaging types with plenty to say, so this session promises to be lively, interesting and impossibly random, which will be just lovely! Again,
you'll be relieved of Dhs 60 for the privilege!

And then on Saturday the 9th, from 1.30-2.30, I'll be in the delightful position of taking to the stage to chat with chef, cookery school owner and writer Anissa Helou in a session titled Life as a Modern Mezze! As any of you who remember The Blog Formerly Known As The Fat Expat will attest, I am far too interested in food for my own good, so I'm really looking forward to this session. A formidable intellect with many hats, Anissa will undoubtedly provide an hour's thought provoking and entertaining dialogue as well as a few tips for getting that mujadarah just right! :) Once again, the pleasure will cost you a mere Dhs 60.

And before you ask, no, none of the proceeds end up in my pocket! See you there!
 

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.

Of Books and Stuff

I did another book club meeting over the weekend, which I posted about over on The Olives Blog. It was a great deal of fun, I can tell you.

I'm now gearing up for the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature at the beginning of March. I'm doing two sessions at the Festival, a panel discussion thingy and a workshop on self publishing and marketing.

The panel discussion is being chaired by literary agent (and former rejecter of my manuscripts, so we'll have a chat about that on the day, won't we?) Luigi Bonomi and features Dubai based author Liz Fenwick, whose debut novel The Cornish House was picked up by Orion and will be published in May and Sarah Hathorn, who self-published her book, Alexandra’s Mission: Teenagent, in 2010 as well as yours truly. We're talking about different routes to get published - Liz obviously got in the front door, while Sarah and I have both attempted to make our money busking outside.The session's linked right here.

The workshop is on how to self publish your book and how to subsequently market the thing. For a start, what should you be doing about editing your MS? What platforms to use to publish it - and how do they work? How do commissions etc work out? What are the restrictions that apply to publishing here compared to, say, the UK? And then how do you put it in readers' hands?

As Simon Forward pointed out in his shockingly sensible guest post on this very blog the other day, the wonderful egalitarianism of self publishing has not only resulted in the lunatics having a good bash at taking over the asylum, it has opened the gates of qualitatively filtered content hell and also resulted in the Internet filling up with plaintively parping authors wittering 'Read my book, read my book, read my book' all the time.

So how can you possibly get your book noticed while standing out from the crowd? The workshop's a tad pricey at Dhs 200 (it's linked here if you want to rush over and sign up) but if you're planning on self publishing a book in the UAE, I guess I'd easily save you that in time wasting publishing lessons learned that you won't have to, let alone the stuff on marketing and promotion (note I am not outselling JK Rowling, so my wise words on promotion are perhaps worth considering rather than following slavishly!).

Both sessions take place on the 9th March in the afternoon. If you want to follow the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature on Twitter, the hashtag's #EAFOL and the main festival programme's linked here because quite apart from my stellar self, there are a number of other (obviously less important) writers giving talks, sessions, workshops and general literary chatter.

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'.