A Dubai Writer's Workshop - Book Writing, Editing And Publishing

The Brand Spanking New Bookshop at Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC)

STOP PRESS

Last session tonight - 28th October - at 6.30pm sharp! So far it's been busy but there have generally been enough seats/tabletops to go around. Tonight (more below) is about how to find a publisher or, alternatively, do it yourself!

So you think you might have a book in you and you want to let it out, a little like the icky scene in Alien. You know, that one. A book is born! Pop! Squelch!

Well, I might be able to help. Then again I might be of absolutely no use at all. It's one of those gambles you have to take in life.

On Tuesday 14th, 21st and 28th October 2014 respectively, from 6.30pm until 8.30pm, I'll be running a series of workshops at Bookshop - the funky new book sales outlet in DIFC from those lovely (if perhaps just a little potty) people at BrownBook.

We did a vaguely similar series of workshops at Archive early last year at which people appeared to have fun, but then they were maybe just being polite... And if you miss this lot, you can pay good money to come along to the writing and publishing workshop I'll be holding at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature next year.

But these ones are... shhh... free!

How to Write a Book

Tuesday 14th October
Bookshop Dubai (DIFC) 6.30pm

I've written blog posts on this very topic if you want to mug up or just avoid having to spend two hours glued to a seat with me screaming abuse at you. At the actual workshop, we're going to look at the history, nature and purpose of narrative, and then delve into what makes people write books, how you can save time by thinking through some key stuff beforehand, structures of narrative and why you need to mull six honest serving men before you ever tap a key. Then we'll be lurching into how to structure your book and tell your story in the most compelling and exciting way. We'll look at nasty stuff like POV and characterisation before we zoom into writing techniques to help you make the most out of your story, including stuff like crafting dialogue and building brilliant exposition that flies rather than plods. If you survive that lot, you might make it on to...

How to Edit a Book

Tuesday 21st October
Bookshop Dubai (DIFC) 6.30pm

Editing is a vital skill for any writer, not least because the less work your editor has to do on correcting your sloppy manuscript, the more quality of thought and deed you'll get from the edit. Trust me. We'll be looking at the power of words, at the importance of word choice in various situations and then getting all down and dirty with different types of edit, from the big picture right the way down to the line edit, where all those commas are left quailing in the dark corner of a dank cellar as you wave a shotgun at them. We'll review techniques for creating a synopsis and a book blurb before wandering around the (huge) range of common writing errors you can purge from your work before anyone else gets a chance to see 'em. And then it's on to...

How to Publish a Book

Tuesday 28th October
Bookshop Dubai (DIFC) 6.30pm

We're going to take a look at your two most likely routes to publication: traditional publishing (finding an agent and a publisher who want to invest in your work) and self publishing (finding an audience who might want to buy and read your book). We'll look at how to prepare your manuscript for both eventualities, the process of publishing - from how to construct query letters through to how to find your audience online. We'll look at appointing an editor, getting an ISBN, printing, creating ebooks and all sorts of other stuff, including online book sales platforms and how you can promote yourself as an author - whether you're traditionally published or self published.

Who the hell am I to be doing this?

Nobody, really. I'm a publishing, digital media and communications consultant by day. By night, I'm the self-published author of three Middle East-based spy thriller novels: Olives - A Violent Romance which caused quite a controversial kerfuffle; Beirut - An Explosive Thriller which landed me a literary agent in London whom I finally dumped and Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy, a novel I'm deeply proud of, but which has so far left the bestseller lists untroubled. I'm currently working on my fourth serious novel, A Simple Irish Farmer. Like I say, yer takes yer risks...


If you'd like to come along - or have a friend who's interested in writing and thinks they might just have a book in them, there's no money or registration or anything involved - but if you'd like a seat, I'd suggest you RSVP by leaving a comment on the blog, hitting me up on Twitter (@alexandermcnabb), facebook (/alexandermcnabb), using the contact form on alexandermcnabb.com or emailing me at alexander@alexandermcnabb.com. I'm sort of easilyreachable...

For location and so on, you can hit up Bookshop here.

I'm also at the excellent ExpatWoman Family Fair on November 8th AND co-hosting a 'Literary Lunch' at Dubai World Trade Centre on the same day. I am clearly in the process of cloning myself...

Tata for now!

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?

Book Research Is SUCH a Drag...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There comes a time when some form of reality has to intrude into writing novels, usually when you feel someone with access to the Internet is going to bother to work out if a fifty metre luxury yacht with such and such engines would take three days to go from Northern Spain to Malta, whether turning left from the main Dead Sea to Amman highway would take you to Bethany now there's a dual carriageway in place and you'd actually have to take a U-turn or indeed if you can actually buy terminal cancer drug Roxanol over the counter from a Lebanese pharmacy.

Researching Olives - A Violent Romance took huge dedication and involved drinking Martinis in the Four Seasons Amman, sploshing about smoking Cohibas in the Dead Sea and necking red wine in conservatories overlooking the rain-swept streets of an Amman winter. I had to eat sunny Mezzes overlooking the Golan Heights and wander around the warm spring streets of Madaba before lunching on pan-fried potato, eggs and Mediterranean herbs washed down with icy cold beers. It was hard, hard, hard people.

Still reeling from the exertions and huge personal distress I had to invest in Olives, researching Beirut - An Explosive Thriller was breathtakingly difficult. Walking the city's streets with a variety of highly attractive and personable companions, pottering around the Mouawad museum and investing many selfless hours in exploring the labyrinthine bars of Gemmayze, Monot and Hamra were nothing to the long, hard hours of toil drinking in Raouché, wandering the sun-dappled corniche sipping little cups of piping hot espresso from Uncle Deek's and, of course, eating a huge amount of stuff in the name of veracity.

You'll begin to appreciate I have Suffered For My Art. And if that weren't enough, writing Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy took me into the mountains above Beirut for long AlMaza-laced lunches sipping sweet chai nana as my companions sat around puffing shisha in the balmy late afternoon, bees and cicadas competing to provide the soundtrack to our panoramic view of the blue city far below - let alone forays into Aleppo's tragically destroyed C14th Ottoman souk. The sweet days foraging around Tallinn and nights chasing hot plates of rich stock with bobbing islets of pelmeni down with iced vodka were agony, I can assure you. Agony.

So you'll understand the sacrifices I'm about to make in Belfast's pubs and its finest hotel, the endless journeys across Ireland's green sward to possibly the best restaurant in the world and other terrible hardships I'm currently putting into A Simple Irish Farmer. Interviewing an IRA man who did 15 years of a 27-year sentence in Long Kesh, part of the game plan, is probably the nearest thing to real 'work' I'll have ever devoted to researching a book. I'll try not to let the platters and pints distract me. Honest...

Virgin Is Now Stocking Alexander McNabb Books. And I Am Glad.

When Olives - A Violent Romance first started to infest bookshelves around the UAE, the sales team at distributor Jashanmal making their rounds and proposing booksellers stock this finest of novels, it failed to appear on the gorgeous red displays at Virgin Megastores.

A few disappointed tweets from potential buyers down the line, I got in touch with Jashanmal who seemed to hint at a whiff of sulphur, something odd about the relationship between them and the Virgin book buying team. So I hit up Virgin directly and they said they'd stock the book but nothing appeared and more disappointed tweets followed. As the saga went on, between one thing and another, I had the feeling that the books team over at Virgin weren't particularly interested in being nagged by novelists. My emails eventually went unanswered and, frustrated, I finally threw it up as a bad job.

Beirut - An Explosive Thriller came and went, still failing to sully the carmine shelves of that most mega of MegaStores. When the Virgin books people tweeted for ideas of novels set in Jordan they could stock for a promotion, something like 80 people tweeted them about Olives - A Violent Romance. I sent them an email pointing this out and proposing they stock the book but still nothing happened. By now I accepted it was never going to happen.

Until a wee while ago when I was chatting with Virgin Megastore Middle East President Nisreen Shocair about something completely different. "By the way, are we selling your books?" she asked. I poured my heart out to her and she was as baffled a president as I've ever seen. "That's daft. The books team has changed since then, anyway. We'll fix it."

And so she has. I can confirm that if you wander into any Virgin Megastore over the weekend, Dhs60 clutched in your eager hand, you can buy lovely paperback copies of both Olives - A Violent Romance and Beirut - An Explosive Thriller.

Hell, push the boat out, buy one for a friend. Buy them as gifts for the family. Your Facebook followers. Go to town!

Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy, you still have to buy online - paperback or ebook alike. But you never know - as the wee saga above shows - anything can and will change!

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: Shemlan's First Outing

I'm going to be meeting the Twitter Book Club (@TwitBookClub or twitbookclub.org) tomorrow to talk about Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy. It'll be the first time I meet people who've read it who aren't close friends, family or beta readers.

I'm a tad apprehensive, tell the truth. Readers are a funny lot and their perceptions, thoughts and questions never fail to have me rethinking things from a totally different perspective. I suppose I'm lucky in that so far (touch wood) people have generally played nicely, even my protesters have been gentle in their remonstration.

I'm not expecting any protests about Shemlan, although I can't say I was necessarily expecting the controversies of Olives. The book was championed in the year's first edition of Dubai Eye Radio's 'Talking of Books' earlier this month, which was all very nice (the podcast is linked here for your listening pleasure) and the genteel members of the TOB team seem to have enjoyed the read. It'll be interesting to find out what the booky twits all made of it.

If you want to come along tomorrow, I'm assured you're more than welcome. I'll have a couple of copies of Shemlan with me if anyone wants to buy 'em, too! The TwitBookClub meets at 11am Saturday the 18th January (and every third Saturday each month) at Coffeol Emaar Boulevard, Boulevard Plaza, Tower 1, Ground Floor - here's a handy map. There's even 50% off food and 20% off drinks for book club attendees. Yes, you did hear that right. 50% off! Where are you going? Wait for me! Sorry, Dubai radio ad scriptwritis.

I'll let you know how it all goes... In the meantime, if you want to get your own copy, you'll find all the links to buy Shemlan as an ebook or paperback right here.

Book Post - Pills, Skulls and Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy. The Cover.

Gerrard King's Memento Mori

The search for a cover image for Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy was a long one. It was always going to be a mission to follow on from Jessy Shoucair's 'Lipstick Bullet' on the cover of Beirut - An Explosive Thriller.

The image had to be strong, stark and striking and somehow representative of the book itself. I spent long hours playing with various ideas, eventually settling on skulls and pills, an occlusion of the 'deadly' nature of the story and the dependency of protagonist, dying diplomat Jason Hartmoor, on painkillers and enzymes. There's also quite a lot of heroin in the book. If you're gonna do drugs, I reckon you might as well go all out, see?

I found one stock shot that seemed to go down that road, a skull and crossbones made from pills that I shared with the nice people on my mailer (Look! To the right! You can sign up too and get occasional updates, freebies and answer silly questions about book covers!), asking them what they thought. The answer duly came back and it boiled down to 'get what you're doing there but meh.'

A few more frustrated hours of playing with ideas and Googling followed before I stumbled across an image that leapt out of the screen, stuck its fingers up my nostrils and smacked my head on the keyboard. It was one of a series created by Australian artist Gerrard King, called 'Memento Mori'. I hit Gerrard up on Facebook and we quickly agreed a license for me to use his image on the book and in promotional work for Shemlan. Oddly enough, it turned out he had some history with Dubai - for a time he had been a 'trolly dolly' on Emirates. Seven points of separation and all that, see?

Gerrard's art is startling, surreal and bold stuff - you can follow the links below to explore more of his wild forays into gibbering insanity. In the meantime, I took the opportunity to interview 'Mr Pill Skull'...

What started your fascination with skulls as canvases? 
My thing for the skull has really incubated since youth. From the very first one adorning my school bag in '88 (I think it was Guns n Roses) to what you see now. The skull to me, is a perfect sculptural form with an ever-changing mood. It can be classical one minute and hair metal the next!

Why the pill/skull occlusion. What made you think of the image? 
The Memento Mori series really is about juxtaposing elements of pop, fashion and western culture with the classic skull, echoing the deep-rooted tradition of skull ornamentation prevalent in other cultures. The pill design harks to a classic '70s fabric design by Marimekko, which takes on a sense of irony when combined with the skull. I kept thinking of the song 'Mother's Little Helper' by The Rolling Stones while doing this piece.

Your work splits into pop, surrealism, realism and skulls. Will there be a fifth category? 
It's true that I do not like to be pigeon-holed with a particular style, preferring to float between whichever means serve the end. I couldn't say what I may do next, so yes, I will probably add another arrow to my quiver somewhere along the line.

Where do you sell most of your work - do you generally feel 'understood'? 
I sell my artwork at events, self-organised exhibitions and markets, as well as online. Living in a tourist area, one can easily feel misunderstood by throngs of holiday-makers looking for beach scenes and cutesy mementos. I have developed a bit of a support crew where I live who continually support my endeavours and drink free wine at my exhibitions!

Is this your first book cover? Do you see Gerrard King placemats or biscuit tins looming over the horizon? 
Ha ha! Yes this is my first cover image on an intelligent publication. I draw the line at prints and tee shirts for now, but if they were damn fine biscuits, well...!

Here's Gerrard's website with galleries and the like or you can see what he's getting up to here on Facebook.

And here, of course, is the handy link to buy Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy  complete with its scary cover in paperback, Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Android tablet or iPad formats!

Book Post: A Question Of Trilogy

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book Post: The Spies Of Shemlan

The frontispiece of my prized copy of Arabia Felix. 

Note TE Lawrence was, at the time he wrote his 

foreword for Thomas' book, going under the name TE Shaw.

Conceived with the genuine intention of building bridges between the British officer and governing class and the people of the Arab World, the Middle East Centre for Arab Studies (MECAS) was founded by noted Arabist Bertram Thomas - the author of Arabia Felix, a friend of TE Lawrence's and very much a member of the 'Middle East gang' of prominent arabists connected with, among other things, Military Intelligence (the MI in MI5 and MI6). Storrs, Lawrence, Wingate, Thomas, Stark, Bell - these names trip off the tongue, but they were a highly influential little bunch of interconnected people swimming in a pond of finite size.

It's this connection with intelligence that's so hard to shake, right from the very conception of MECAS. While it may have had lofty aims, there was a whiff of sulphur connected to figures such as Thomas and his contemporary, Harry St John Bridger Philby - father of the notorious 'Kim' Philby, a man who has been connected with MECAS although it appears the connection was tenuous at best. Philby lived in Beirut for a time working for The Economist (and spying) and was said to have socialised with MECAS students. He never did study at the school.

But George Blake did. And Blake was one of the most notorious spies of the Cold War.

It was Blake who was to give the Centre a high profile student to justify Kamal Jumblatt’s assertion that MECAS was ‘A school for spies’. Blake, born George Behar in 1922, is still alive, living in exile in Moscow. He is said to have betrayed over 400 British spies in his remarkable career as a Soviet double agent - a career that ended with his in camera trial and subsequent 42-year prison sentence. The sentence was notably long, the judge finding him guilty on three separate counts of spying and handing out three maximum sentences. Newspapers at the time claimed the sentence represented a year for every British spy killed as a result of Blake's many betrayals but, fun though it sounds, it appears the claim was editorial embellishment.

A highly resourceful man who had enjoyed a remarkable career with the Dutch resistance in the war, Blake conspired to escape from Wormwood Scrubs prison in October 1966 and fled to Moscow via East Germany.

But as far as the Lebanese were concerned, it just went to prove what they’d always suspected. Up there in Shemlan, was The British Spy School. And people on the mountain still call it that – even though the Centre has long been closed and its building converted to house an orphanage. The legend lives on.

It's actually how I first found the MECAS building in Shemlan. We were looking for the Middle East Centre for Arab Studies, but understanding dawned on the puzzled face of the man we asked for directions, "Oh, you mean the British spy school!" he said.

By then I knew MECAS was going to be at the very centre of Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy. Which, incidentally, you can buy here either as an ebook or in print. See what I did there? Subtle, me...

BOOK POST: Shemlan and the Big C

Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy is about a man with terminal cancer whose journey into his past  to find the lost love of his life stirs up a hornet's nest that threatens to kill him before the disease does.

I so far have not had, but am fully expecting, the reaction 'But I don't want to read a book about someone dying of cancer.'

I genuinely hadn't given it a moment's thought until I hit the 'go' button on the various publishing platforms I've used. But then I've never really set out to make life easy for myself with this whole book thing.

I can even sympathise with that reaction. I suffered it myself to a certain degree when the book was being conceived.

Jason Hartmoor was born when Barry Cook came to stay with us back in 2008. I posted about his visit on the blog a while afterwards and I do heartily recommend you take a read. Barry had been fighting off cancer for ten years and was desperately ill. I had dreaded the visit - we knew we were going to be playing host to a terminally ill cancer patient and had both steeled ourselves for a pretty hellish three days. We were to be totally blindsided by what happened next.

"I didn't stop laughing, or smiling, for the next 72 hours. Not only were our visitors delightful company, Barry was nothing short of inspirational. Although he'd get the odd twinge of pain in his back and needed to take enzymes to aid his digestion, he was more on top of a disease so chronic that an x-ray of his skeleton showed the cancer was so widespread it was like 'someone had thrown a handful of sticky rice grains at it' than I could ever have imagined. He'd been fighting it for ten years and was still beating it back."

And so was born the Roxanol and enzyme popping Jason Hartmoor. The resemblance ends there, Barry was a charismatic, laughing man with enough charm and twinkle for ten. But I had been building a 'challenged' character and Barry's condition - with its inevitable end - wriggled its way into that character. I think Barry himself crept into Hartmoor every now and then - Jason's lighter, more human moments are probably Barry breaking through.

I've often talked about how authors 'steal' people. This is the ultimate example, stealing a dying man. But blag away I did. My only defence is that it wasn't intentional.

I didn't want to make Hartmoor's condition harrowing or graphic in itself, at least in part because Barry had shown me having cancer doesn't necessarily mean every day is spent recalling your last chemo session or the day you first found out. After ten years, it had settled into a sort of 'business as usual' for him. Hartmoor gets tired: he fatigues easily and has to depend on The Hated Stick more than he would like to - increasingly so as the book progresses. He's frail, his routines are those of a man who depends absolutely on his medication - particularly the painkillers. But his disease has become a fact of life for him, a constant companion he has reached a sort of understanding with.

The constancy of Roxanol, by the way, was the reason I was so taken by the cover image, by Australian artist Gerrard King. But more of that another time...

So I wouldn't let the fact there's a man with cancer at the heart of Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy stop you reading it. In fact, I'd rather like to think it was yet another reason TO read it.

The link's to the right of this post. Do it now before you forget...

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 - Populating Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy

Image via CrunchBase

So we pushed the button yesterday, but even in the 'Internet age' these things can take time. We're looking at three editions of Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy: Smashwords, Kindle and CreateSpace. Here's what happens when you press 'go' on a book.

Smashwords
Smashwords populates pretty much instantaneously, provided your documents are formatted in the required fashion. Smashwords' own guide to formatting is a free download and reading it will save you time and hassle. I choose not to publish to Kindle using Smashwords but use Amazon's own Kindle Direct Publishing. Once 'Meatgrinder', Smashwords' multi-publishing engine, has done its work, the book is available on the Smashwords site as an ebook compatible with Sony, Kobo, Barnes and Noble's Nook and Apple's iBooks. So you can go to Smashwords here and buy Shemlan.

Smashwords also populates the relative stores - B&N, Kobo and iBooks. But that takes a good deal longer - it's part of the 'Premium Catalog' and requires quality checking by Smashwords before that goes ahead. So for now, it's just Smashwords, not the retail sites. That can take a week or so.

Kindle Direct Publishing
Kindle takes a while longer, promising 12-24 hours but usually beating that quite comfortably. In fact, the Kindle book of Shemlan was up a few hours after Smashwords. So you can go here to buy Shemlan from Amazon in the UK or here to buy it from Amazon.com. There are now Amazons around Europe and even further afield, including Japan, but posting all those links is just too exhausting. I have never sold a book in Japan.

CreateSpace
This is the print edition of Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy and takes longest. Createspace is currently still reviewing the book files. Once they've passed the files (an automated check is performed when you press 'go' but they still do a manual check following that), they'll populate the Createspace store, Amazon and then expanded distribution outlets such as The Book Depository. This can take a couple of weeks.

While that's happening, it's down to compiling the list of reviewers/book blogs. And yes, you're all in for a rough old ride because I'm in promo mode now and that means bugging everyone and their uncles to run around screaming 'buy Alexander McNabb's novel Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy now now now!'

It's not about you buying it, see - it's about you getting everyone you know to tell everyone they know to buy it!!!

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 - A Deadly Tragedy - The Cover

The cover of Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy.

Australian artist Gerrard King created the cover image for Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy. I stumbled across it during a session of frustrated Googling, having found various images that just wouldn't really do the job. I was looking for a combination of pills and death, two themes that run through the book, and you'd hardly find a better themic concatenation than Gerrard's decorated skull - one of a series he created as part of a perhaps worryingly extensive exploration of the artistic potentialities of skulls.

I had tested a tentative image or two with my pals over on the mailing list only to find them definitely 'meh' about the ideas. But this one really does the job - it's got impact, vavavoom and lipstick bullet following kabamm - in my humble opinion.

The image file (1600x2500 resolution both for Kindle and Smashwords, people) is ready to upload, as is the full Createspace cover. I have yet to finalise the .prc format text file for Kindle, the .docx file for Smashwords (all Meatginder-ready) and the Createspace text file. That's today's job.

And then tomorrow I'll be pushing various buttons at the 'How to self-publish a book' workshop at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature's spiritual and temporal home, the lovely and tranquil barjeel-laden Dar Al Adab tomorrow. The Hunna ladies group of writers will be gathered to watch in puzzlement as I wrestle with the various feersum endjinns involved in actually making a book happen in this brave new eworld of ours.

And then, gradually, pixels will pixellate. It's all quite exciting, really...

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.

Book Post: Writing Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy

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

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

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

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

The idea seems to have stuck around, no?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book Post - Finishing Shemlan

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I finished writing Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy back in March. Today I finished work on the book.

Once it was written, it got sent out to a bunch of 'beta readers', basically people who represent a good cross-section of book readers and whose opinions - for better or worse - I value. Some give some broad brush feedback, much what you'd expect from a casual reader commenting, others go into considerable depth, questioning word choices, structure, character motivations and so on. The result is a hard edit or two, often requiring a scene added or redone here and there.

Once all that was done, I sent the book out to my agent to see what his reaction would be. That resulted in me ending my relationship with him, but by this time we're at the end of June - one of my issues here is it took my own agent three months to get around to looking at the MS. I blew another month sending to another couple of agents and it wasn't until early August I got the MS off to editorial consultancy Bubblecow. Early September saw them return the edits with some notes on structure that have resulted in some reasonably large changes to the manuscript. It's taken until today to put those into action.

Writing a book is just like building a house. And sometimes you just have to knock down rooms and rebuild them - and then clear up after you.

The good news is that I've found my cover image and it is, IMHO, the mustard. That search alone has taken months.

Anyway, the end of the tunnel's in sight. Now there are just another round of beta reads and another edit - then I can start formatting the ebook. If we're lucky we'll make October.

And you thought online publishing moved at the speed of light!!!

Book Post - Stuck

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I Am No Longer With Agent

(Photo credit: jafsegal)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beirut Off Limits?

(Photo credit: Côte d’Azur)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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