Birdkill And The Drugs Of War

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Birdkill is about a teacher, Robyn Shaw, who has lost a chunk of her past to amnesia after her mind has shut a recent trauma out. Fragile and perhaps slightly unbalanced, she starts work at an institute for exceptionally gifted children where she finds herself increasingly disturbed by events.

As Robyn struggles for sanity, her friend Mariam tries to get to the bottom of the secrets surrounding Robyn and the Hamilton Institute. Handed a US Army whistle-blower, Mariam starts to investigate a secret battlefield enhancement and drugs program called ODIN. The more she finds out, the more dangerous her life gets.

The worrying thing is not what a tall tale ODIN is, but how similar it is to efforts by various militaries to create 'supermen' using drugs and other enhancement techniques - some of which have gone horribly wrong. It's a little like finding my lost Oka nuclear missiles in researching Beirut - An Explosive Thriller - the facts you uncover researching books at times make the fiction seem, well, a little dull.

Drugs have been a tool of war for hundreds of years. Our very own part of the world contributes its own tale of battlefield drugs, with the infamous Ismaili rebel Hassan Al Sabbah establishing his mountain fortress in Alamut Castle up in the craggy mountains of Northern Iran and sending his hashish-crazed warriors against the Seljuks. The soldiers, the hashishim, give us our word 'assassin' today.

Hitler was an enthusiastic convert to the use of drugs, despite Nazism's prudery in other aspects of bohemianism. The German rush to conquer Europe was fuelled on massive supplies of Pervitin, a synthetic methamphetamine. 35 million tablets shipped to German forces in 1940 alone, each packing a 3mg dose of good old fashioned speed.

By 1941, the German Supreme Command had realised that uppers came with downers and was restricting its enthusiastic use of Pervitin. But stories of remarkable achievements made by soldiers under the influence of the drug led to trials of other battlefield drugs, including one pill which packed a cocktail of 5mg of cocaine, 3mg of Pervitin and 5mg of painkiller Eukodal. Throughout the war, the Fuhrer himself was bouyed up by near-constant doses of Pervitin. Imagine Lemmy running Nazi Germany and you've got something like the idea of how much trouble everyone was in.

It wasn't just the Germans,  though. The British and Americans both used amphetamines for their bomber crews, including Benzedrine and Dexedrine. Even the Japanese got in on the act. Despite their usefulness as a stimulant for weary soldiers, the come-downs and addictiveness of amphetamines led to their being tightly controlled as a drug. And yet the Americans are still handing out Dexies to their pilots in 10mg doses today.

Other 'wonder drugs' routinely find their way into military use. Several have chequered histories, including Methylhexanamine (say that after a couple of stiff ones) or DMAA, which has been linked to a number of military and sporting deaths. The British army experimented widely with LSD in the 1950s, the Americans (aiming this time not at enhancing their own troops but at taking down the enemy) with LSD and other agents as weaponised aerosols in the 1960s.

Of the very many military enhancement programmes that have run since WWII, probably the most 'holistic' was DARPA's Peak Soldier Performance Programme, which ran in the early noughties. This looked at every aspect of performance enhancement, including genomic and biochemical approaches. A Presidential report at the time referred to the danger of 'potential development of drugs that could suppress the fear and inhibition of soldiers, effectively turning them into killing machines capable of acting without both scrutiny and impunity.'

The disastrous ODIN military trial in Birdkill is not only NOT far fetched, but scarily real and based on pretty solid precedent... Which is actually something of a worry...

Beyond IQ: Birdkill And The 150 Problem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Decent Bomber And The Wilfulness of Characters

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A gentle tapping on his cheek. A wipe of wet cloth on his forehead. The awareness of light though his swollen lids. An insistent voice, deep, repeated his name. ‘Mister Quinlan, Mister Quinlan.’ Accented, the title sounded more like mist air.

   He took a deep, juddering breath and tried to focus. His hands flared pain. He tasted blood, his mouth dry. Cool ceramic touched his lips and he leaned forwards to sip gratefully at the icy water. His shattered ribs grated and forced him to cry out, bubbling the water. He spilled a pink dribble down his sodden, spattered shirt.

   'Can you hear me Mister Quinlan?’ Mist Air Queen Larne ‘There has been a mistake. These men have been foolish. Do you understand?’

    Quinlan nodded. He could just make out the face peering into his own, a look of concern on the dark-skinned features. He tried to speak, his fat lips throbbed and tore, a stab of pain. ‘W-who?’

   ‘My name doesn’t matter, Mister Quinlan. Some call me The Accountant. It is but a conceit. You are safe, now. Tell me, who is the bomb maker, please? The one who made the big bombs?’

   Quinlan groaned. He tried to raise his head. ‘Big?’ He saw stars, felt a deep lassitude. The cold cloth was pressed to his brow again.

   ‘You remember? The bombs your people made for London and Manchester. People still talk of them. The very, very big bombs. Boom.’

   Christ, but that was twenty year and more ago! Quinlan wanted to say. But the cat had his tongue.

   ‘Come. You know who made them. Tell me his name, Mister Quinlan.’

   It came to him. Of course it did. Jesus, but that was Pat. Dear old Pat.

   ‘Pat,’ Quinlan croaked. ‘Pat O’Carolan.’

   ‘Where is he?’

   He tried to grin. Ah, these people. Stop, now. ‘Tipp. South Tipp.’ Another beautiful sip of water offered to his beaten lips.

   Bliss.

   ‘Where is Tip, please?’

   ‘Tipperary. The-the Republic.’ He was drooling, sloppy-mouthed. The pain clamoured, in and out of focus in waves, his battered nerves shrieked every time he moved his broken body.

   ‘And what is his code word?’

   ‘I-I don’t know any c-code—’

   The blow to his cheek came fast and with the hard edge of the man’s hand. Quinlan’s jaw crunched. Pain blossomed in his mouth, both old ache and new sharp. His tied arms stiffened and his bloody hands pulsed agony. He moaned and spat out a tooth.

   He sagged against his restraints, snivelling as he tried to breathe through the bloody mucus filling his nose and mouth. ‘Dan.’ He moaned. ‘Breen. Code word. Dan Breen. Danbreen.’

The opening scene of A Decent Bomber was actually the last piece of the book I wrote. The final pass of a number of edits, this one 'filled in' a number of scenes and events I had lazily passed over in the original writing. Sometimes it's these very events you take for granted which actually contain the most important bits in developing the book. In this case, the old version of the book opened with Pat hearing something in his yard and then two Irish Republican politicians discussing Quinlan's fate.

It wasn't enough. Quinlan had to get it, and bad, and we had to be there with him and share his treatment at the hands of some very bad people. I didn't know he had wee girls or a wife called Deirdre or that his mother had died, but somehow in the space of a couple of pages, Quinlan acquired these things (as well as a number of particularly nasty injuries). I did love Mist Air Queen Larne, too. I'm sure it's wrong to enjoy your own writing like this, a sort of literary onanism.

Similarly, Pat's niece Orla was never meant to have a girlfriend, a relationship that throws her life into turmoil. Orla had never considered herself to be you know, different and yet here she was falling for another girl she met at a party. This whole development was the last thing on my mind and I do not for the life of me know where it came from, it just happened. One minute she's on a train looking out of the window and twizzling her red hair, reflected in the window and then, bam, she's falling for another girl, trying to come to terms with this newly awakened sexuality and wondering how she's going to break the news to her Uncle Pat.

It's odd how these things can develop. That relationship, unintended in my original telling, becomes crucial to the story of A Decent Bomber. Orla, already in a state of considerable confusion, gets treated pretty badly in the scheme of things. Not only is she confronted by her strange feelings for another woman, she finds out her beloved uncle Pat isn't quite what he seemed to be. The rock and anchor she seeks in her new turbulence turns out to be a catalyst for complete chaos.

Boyle wriggled his way into the story as an uninvited guest as well. And nobody was as surprised at the way his love life turns out as I was. One minute he's in his office and the next my fingers had tapped out a scene that was the last thing from my mind. I actually sat back and questioned what the hell had just gone on there. I hadn't meant it to happen at all and then found myself having to deal with the consequences - just as Boyle must have had to have done.

Sometimes these things happen. Characters do stuff they're not supposed to, grow a life for themselves and make their own decisions. You just have to go along with it and let them do their thing. It often works out rather wonderfully - in Shemlan, for instance, it led to the whole glorious car chase across a frozen Baltic sea. I didn't even know the Baltic froze over, let alone that there were seasonal ice roads connecting the Estonian mainland with its islands. In A Decent Bomber, that unplanned relationship of Orla's ended up resolving the whole book.

What goes around comes around, in writing books as in life...

A Decent Bomber is currently available on Amazon.com and all decent book outlets on pre-order, publishing on November 5th 2015. Go and do it now, don't put it off. You know it makes sense...

Publishing A Decent Bomber

Perpetua (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

For what it's worth, I've been embroiled in a last minute flurry of edits and changes, a lot of book formatting and layout and quite a bit of uploading.

It's all quite exciting. For a start, I find layout therapeutic, a load of rote tasks performed with the assistance of a glass or two of Bombay's finest and some quinine-laced fizzy stuff. Page down, change headline to 22 point Perpetua, body font Palatino Linotype first para no indent, second para 0.5cm indent.

I've been messing around a lot with font sizes, templates and margins and think I've got quite a good combination going now, so I'm trying to reformat all of my print books to meet the new grid. Slightly more space and a slightly larger font/leading. After much soul searching, Garamond is going and Palatino is this year's body text bikini model.

Like people give a hoot? Yes, I think easy on the eye is good if it's unobtrusive and the reader finds it more comfortable. Do I care too much about type? Oh, yah. Seriously. Perpetua, and I'm sure you'll think I'm odd saying this, is my typographical Musar; the Orrefors of the world of letters. I have long admired the odd life and achievements of eccentric stone cutter (and enthusiastic rutter) Eric Gill - the William Morris contemporary who gave us the London Underground's typographical identity, which persists today, as well as WH Smith's logo - and Perpetua was, to my mind, his finest lifetime achievement. Seriously.

Sorry. Sidetracked again.

Check spellings, get annoyed at Microsoft's daft blue-lining of things that are patently right. Catch SNAFU, wince, change.

Then the MS, updated to reflect my Createspace edits. Lose all the italics in the book, damn, spend an hour replacing them using the Createspace file as a reference. Fine. Review some of those itals and lose a couple. Find an awful literal sitting there in the text snarling at you like a drugged-up bullfrog. Excise the bastard like one of George Bush's colonic polyps. You'd have thought I was experienced enough not to have to deal with these things. Oh no.

The manuscript is now complete and uploaded to Createspace, Amazon KDP and Smashwords and so A Decent Bomber is available for pre-order from Amazon as a Kindle book, from iBooks, Barnes and Noble, Kobo and many other brilliant, decent even, ebook platforms. It publishes 'officially' on November 5th, but every pre-order means another heave up the rankings on that day, so I'll be irritating everyone I know between now and then to pre-place their orders. The Createspace book, the paperback, will go 'live' sometime in the next week.

I won't, once again, be doing a conventional print run. It's simply not worth it. Olives took five years to make back its Dhs15,000 investment and I still don't have a final report from the distributors, despite the book having sold out before last year's Emirates Airline Festival of Literature.

But I'm happy. Truly happy. Two years in the writing, albeit with very many breaks and stops, A Decent Bomber is now a novel I can say has merit and personality enough to be a readable thing.

Which is nice...

I Just Finished A New Book

Small Craft on a Milk Sea (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It's a bit mad, but I've written another book. I finished it today. It's going to need some editing and tweaking and stuff yet; it's just a first draft, but it's done. 80,000 words of it. And it feels right.

Agents haven't finished rejecting A Simple Irish Farmer (almost certainly to be re-titled) yet and I haven't even had final feedback from beta readers preparatory to getting it edited and proofed, let alone published it. And I've gone and written another one!

It's been an amazing roller-coaster of a journey. As usual with my books, it all started with a dream, one I had years and years ago. And it ends with another dream, one which recurred for a while a few years back, enough to become an enduring memory. The two dreams became conflated in my mind a long time ago, I sort of knew this book was going to happen like this but ASIF sort of pushed in.

I've been blasting away for the last month, managing a good thousand words on most days, frequently more. Unusually for me, I took a good couple of weeks to outline the plot, pretty much chapter by chapter and scene by scene. That framework meant I was focused on making the writing work, setting and building the scenes more carefully rather than worrying about plot development. The plot still changed, of course, with scenes suggesting themselves and, in one case, two of my characters doing something I had most definitely not intended them to! I only turned my back for a second and they were at it like rabbits. But in general, the book follows the structure I had originally intended, with a few unplanned twists and curves and one major refocus of the plot later on because I was being lazy and that shows through when you write books.

I haven't written a book this quickly since Olives - A Violent Romance, which took four weeks. And this one won't take seven years of editing, I can tell you!

FWIW, Deadmau5 has been a major musical inspiration, with lots of Brian Eno and Harold Budd, perennial favourites Silence and Sigur Ros, a goodly dollop of David Holmes, some Nine Inch Nails and quite a lot of Professor Kliq, Rim Banna and a few slices of William Orbit.

And now, to celebrate, a visit to Bombay to celebrate its lovely Sapphire...

Tomorrow, it's edit time...

Novels, Dreams, Stuff, Books, Things.

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When I started work on Beirut - An Explosive Thriller way back in November 2009, I posted this here lump of semi-prose on da blog. It was the dream/half-thought that was to lead to the book's creation, along with another nocturnal shade, a morning time dream-memory of a man being propositioned by a peroxide cropped-haired girl in the cold German winter night and brushing her off. These things coalesced over time and became the book that is the book it is.

Olives - A Violent Romance was also conceived from a dream-memory. I woke with a book in my head after sleeping to George Winston's February Sea - a track that made me think of a girl dancing in the rain, a scene that is actually physically and literally at the very centre of the book today.

And Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy started with a dream, too - although the dream sequence itself didn't make it into the final book: Shemlan opens with Jason Hartmoor wakening in a sweat after a nightmare.

I've, literally, dreamed my novels. If I've been stuck with a book's progression, I've taken the problem to bed with me and more often than not woken up with the solution - if not clear in my mind, somehow easier with me as I've tackled it the next day.

I love the story of the bloke who invented the sewing machine. Having wrestled with the problem to no avail, he woke up one morning having dreamed of being chased by pygmy head-hunters brandishing spears with a hole in their tips. Eureka!

I think dreams are our way of managing experience and input, a sort of file management routine that lets us sort our most recent experience and weigh it against our remembered relationships, a way of learning that prioritises and balances our memory, learning and experience. We discard the unimportant, re-calculate our understandings and problem solve our issues. We re-balance, based on the inputs from the day that was. I truly believe my subconscious helps me build books.

I might, clearly, just be a total loony.

Many, many years ago I woke with the below in my head. I shared it with my girlfriend at the time, who lived in Sharjah while I lived in Northampton, in the UK. She's my wife now (Oh dear, that was rather League of Gentlemen, wasn't it?). It's probably my first attempt at writing, although the very idea of writing books hadn't occurred to me at the time. The short story I dashed down while the memory was still clear in my head all those years back has queued patiently to take its turn, but now it is my main focus. This is the core of my new book and I can't stop working on it. I've started writing again, having just finished The Simple Irish Farmer or whatever it'll be called.

I swear to God, it's a disease - an addiction...

______________________________________________________________________

Martin

Ashridge was a welcome contrast from the grey oppression of the city. After only a week living by the forest I had recovered my interest in life and work. The only source of worry in my delight with these freshened circumstances was that Mariam hadn't been able to get away from the city to come up and see me yet.

The city! A memorable misery; three years of making do and being alone amongst millions. Spending my working days in an antiseptic environment, preferable to the dirt, smoke and rush of the morning and evening commute. Even the small bedsit I had managed to find was little comfort as a haven, depressing every sensibility with its Victorian plumbing and Edwardian wallpaper. The ageing shabbiness came with a very modern price tag. London evenings were just a gap to fill between work, food and bed.

Even then, late at night, the city intruded. I had grown used to traffic rumbling through my short time of clear reflection before sleep, too used to faces that had no time, no concern for anything other than their own secret miseries. Now, here in the country, I found light, laughter, sharp air and the heady scents of wet leaves and fresh grass. At night I sat by my own handiwork, a wood fire that filled the living room of the little house with warmth and the hint of pine in its smoke.

Before I went to work at the Institute each day, the cold morning light would find me padding with a little thrill across the rough flagstones of the hall with the makings of the fire to prepare for my homecoming. Scrunched paper, criss-crossed twigs, then a couple of larger cuts laid down ready to take to flame on my return in the chill night. A lifetime away from igniting the Bakelite gas fire that brought warmth to that dingy London flat.

Of course the dog took to his new life immediately, not a moment’s hesitation there as he pounded down the woodland paths each day. Even buying a dog had been a trial in London, the pet shop filled with animal screeches and the sight of puppies scrabbling for space in tiny cages forming a background to the spectacle of the owner in her shabby pink dress and painted face.

Her voice rasped with fags and an awful confiding leer in every vowel. ‘You can't keep a big dog like this in a flat, you know.’ She coughed at me. ‘They grow up hellish fast.’

But I wasn’t buying year-old Bill for a flat. I was buying him to move into the great outdoors and now the patter of his claws on the flagstones peppered the silences, barking as he rushed to meet me every evening, Bill The Happy Labrador. I delighted in the contrast: cold screens and air conditioned clean rooms by day, a red glow and glass of scotch at night. After five days in the country, the hammering in my head receded and my new employer had commented on the brilliance of his find. 

This was my first weekend at Ashridge, and I wasted no time in pulling the collar and lead off the coat hook (with the usual attendant barking and skittering) and sallying forth on a long Saturday walk. Bill pulled and my feet scrunched on the wet gravel path, clouds of breath in the bright morning air. Soon we were away from the road, and I let Bill off and stooped as he bounded away chasing ghosts in the undergrowth. The woods took us both in, the dog and I, and we meandered for over an hour together through the pathways, Bill racing in great, curving arcs through the heather, returning to tease me with his big, brown laughing eyes.

I heard the children laughing a long time before I saw the green light of open field through the woodland. Bill was off nosing through the undergrowth again, muddling through the heather and snuffling excitedly at the day-old scent of pheasant. Labradors, I have found, are the world's greatest optimists, becoming so ecstatic at the prospect of game that they rush off making the most awful racket, never seeming to mind that every animal for a mile around has instantly gone to ground. Making enough noise for six humans, poor old Bill would never catch even the most stupid pheasant. And believe me, pheasants are off the dial stupid.

Nevertheless, he was delighted to be pushing through the bracken, and I was happy enough walking the dark leaf mould and listening to the far-off tinkle of children’s laughter. It must have come a good ten minutes after I had first heard them, the red flash of a tiny figure running past the opening into a field. Bill re-joined me on the path, soil on his muzzle, and leaves on his back. I dropped my cigarette, careful to heel a hole and bury the smoking mottled orange stub in a shallow grave of wet leaves.

I will never know why I didn't just walk straight onto the common. It was the first time I had walked that path, although I had strolled in the vast woodland several times during my short stay in the area. I’d normally have carried on through onto the common, and into the next patch of trees visible past the gentle rise of the otherwise flat grassland. But I stood just inside the shaded boundary of the wood and watched the source of the laughter, six children playing by the other edge of the common, some two hundred yards distant. Four were boys, about eleven years of age. The two girls were distinguishable only because they had longer hair, all six dressed in jumpers and jeans. They were capering around one of the boys, the smallest, who was standing stock still, and looking towards the top of the trees bordering the third side of the grassland.

The girl in the red jumper seemed to be leading the whooping dance around the small, expectant figure. The boy, still fixing his gaze on the treetops, reached down, and touched the tip of a small brown pile with his index figure. As he straightened, Bill pushed against my leg and, in my annoyance at the dog for breaking the spell of my voyeurism, I almost missed the boy reach out his arm to the sky. Red jumper faltered, and fell to the grass, screaming. As the dancers stopped, and the girl on the ground kicked, a bird flew to the small boy, perching on his beckoning index finger. Quick as lighting, he grasped the bird with his other hand, and twisted its neck. I heard the faint, high pitched crack.

Again he reached upwards, and again a sparrow alighted, only to drop to the pile of dead birds. Red jumper screamed again as a third bird came to its caller and fell to the pile. A fourth. A fifth. The dancers had come close now, and were holding hands as a sixth bird died. Red jumper was silent as the pile grew, she staggered to her feet and joined the dancers but I could see her pallor, even from that distance. My senses returned and I blundered through the undergrowth towards the group of children to stop this wrongness. Something clamped onto my mind and I slammed against the trunk of a tree, grasping it like a long lost friend.

The boy had turned, and stood with his hand stretched out to me. Doubt and foreboding filled me as his beckoning filled my vision and the urge to go to him, to give my life up to him, hammered at me. I looked down to avoid that intense stare. Bile rose in my throat. Green stains were slashed across my chest from the lichen on the tree-trunk. My impelled legs were heavy, not mine to command. I fought, my arms clutching at the rough bark, my body compulsively jerking forward. An age of battling the urge to run to him and be consumed before a girl's scream broke the spell. ‘Martin!’

It shed the urge like the lifting of stone weights pressing the life from me. The desire to be another sparrow evaporated as the boy turned and fled with the others into the far woodland. I slid down the trunk, spent, its roughness scraping my back. I sat in the wet leaves, tears running down my cheeks and bewildered Bill licking at my face.

How To Make Books

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On the 5th March 2015, I'll be spending a couple of hours of my afternoon telling a small and bemused audience at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature how to make books in the UAE (or elsewhere, actually).

I'm intending to start with a blank piece of paper and end with a shiny, printed book full of lovingly sequenced words, something I have traditionally spent three two-hour sessions doing (How to write books; how to edit books and how to publish books respectively), so squeezing it all into one short blob of 120 minutes is going to be a laugh.

If your idea of fun is sitting with other worried people as a strange man cackles, gibbers profanity and strews the air with streams of disconnected and scabrous half-thought, you can book a place at the session right here. It costs Dhs200 per person which I hasten to add I don't get my hands on. I'm doing it for free: the LitFest keeps the lot. Like a sort of literary European Central Bank, they are...

So what do you get for your hard-earned cash?

For starters, we'll take a look at stories and why we want to tell and write them. We'll look at the structure of a story and why a story even needs a structure. We'll look at characters and locations and at how a combination of the two can be used to create scenes, which build towards chapters. Pretty soon we'll find we've written a whole book and then we'll take the covers off how you edit your own work to knock it, wriggling and squealing, into shape. 

Then we'll look at what you do with it next: seeking an agent and through them a conventional publisher or the alternative - the process of making books yourself in the UAE, from Kindle and iPad e-books through to printed booky books you can riffle through and smell the gutter to get that scent of a 'real book'. 

Of course, our journey will include the unique kinks and needs of publishing print and e-books in the UAE and Middle East,  where things quite often aren't quite what they seem. And then, when you've dragged your noses out of that there gutter, we'll look at book marketing in a short of Shakespeare in 60 seconds sort of way.

All in two hours. Gosh.

If you've been to one of my writing, editing and publishing workshops before, you're not likely to learn anything devastatingly new unless you missed out a session or two. If you have been a prior victim and you're after a refresher (and not a refund, remember: no refunds), this might be interesting. If you're new to this and think you might want to give it all a go, the session should be thought-provoking, fun, packed with ideas and useful to you.

Should. I said should.

5th March, 5-7pm at the Majlis room at the Intercontinental Festival City Conference Centre. You have to book, places are limited and, just to be clear, because I can't say this enough, there are no refunds. The link to the booking page is given above and also here for your clicking convenience.

I might try and make you buy my books at some stage in the proceedings. It's a sort of occupational hazard.

Stalled. A Writer's Nightmare.

I've stalled on the new book. I've written not one word since before the Summer hols. I made some notes and stuff in Belfast and Newry, I sat down for a long chat with a 'Shinner' MP and former IRA man while I was in 'Noori', that fine town in 'Norn Iron', an engagement organised by my lovely Sister in Law and fascinating in so many ways. But I haven't actually been, you know, writing.

'So you served 15 years of a 27 year sentence in Long Kesh. The Maze.'
'That's right.'
'The H Blocks.'
'No, before them. It was Nissen huts, then, segregated on sectarian lines. We used to pass notes across each others' huts. So even the Unionists would pass our notes, and we would pass theirs.'
'Did you get time off for good behaviour?'
'I doubt it. We burned the prison down.'

It's not 'writer's block', that's something different altogether. It's a bit like work on Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy, which was stalled by my decision to publish Olives and Beirut myself. While all that went on, poor old Shemlan took a back seat, unfinished at around the halfway mark. But I went on going to Beirut and visiting the village, the Mountain and other locations in the book. I just didn't write anything.

When I finally sat down to finish Shemlan, jacked into volume 11 death metal and Estonian plain chant, it flew like a jet-propelled Teflon coated flying thing in a vacuum. Hang on, how do things fly in a vacuum if there's no pressure of air or gravity or other opposing force? Help!

So I'm not really angsting about the lack of progress. Things happen in their time and this one obviously needs to 'bed down' a bit before I go on. I trust my instincts well enough by now not to try and keep pushing if my head won't be pushed. The novel's at a crossroads and I need to go back over it, test it against the stuff in my head and correct it before starting construction work again.

I'll know when I'm ready. Life's busy, there's so much going on, distractions are flying like Teflon coated flying things gravitating towards a large body.

In the meantime, any time I get a few moments to sit down to write, I'm ending up scribbling blog posts instead. The paucity of such posts testifies to the lack of time in general.

Where does it all go?

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! :)

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'.