School's Out...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Running in a new car on the Dubai-Al Ain highway is not something I'd recommend, people. It's deadly boring. Nevertheless, this is what I done today as I made my way to Al Ain based Brighton College to appear as an author courtesy the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature.

I spoke to two classes, senior boys and girls respectively (the school's segregated) and the girls were generally more amused and proactive than the boys, who were a little reserved.

The staff members were understandably a little nervous, given the content of my books and my own inclination to go off on the deep end. They have to tread a fine line between tradition and the exploration of international literature, at the same time managing a number of bright, sparky and inquisitive minds. Needless to say, I had a blast. We talked about narrative and its importance, the characterisation of the Middle East by Hollywood and the impact of technology and the Internet on publishing, heralding the inevitable doom of the print run/sales team model of publishing.

After the classroom sessions with the seniors, we were joined by the 8-11 year-olds in the auditorium. This, I was not prepared for. They'd asked me to prepare some readings to give the kids and I gazed down at small, angelic girls with missing teeth beaming up at me and on the instant junked the lot. I couldn't really see my reading from A Decent Bomber helping the 8 year olds sleep that night...

The torture was methodical. Quinlan shrieked himself hoarse, flailing around tied to the kitchen chair until he hurled himself to the floor. They righted him and beat him as dispassionately as they’d pulled out his thumbnails.

And not one word. Not a question. It made it all worse, to think there was nothing they wanted he could give them to make it stop.

They started on his fingers. He called to God, he called to his dear, dead mother. He begged them. Dear Jesus, how he begged. They beat him again to shut him up. His mind slammed down to buy him respite.

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.

And it went downhill from there fast when we started looking at readings from Birdkill and Shemlan...

So instead I showed them how to write a book using Frank L. Baum's Wizard of Oz as a template and then answered their questions. What a bright bunch they were, too!

Which book is your favourite? Why do you write books? How much money do you make? How do you build characters? Do you favour direct or indirect characterisation? You mentioned protagonists but what about antagonists? What are your books about (very carefully answered, given the question was from one of the 8 year-olds!)? What do you do about writer's block? What inspires you to create characters?

The questions came in rushes, arms across the auditorium waving in the air. And then I signed pages of A4 paper for the kids who were too young to be let buy my books. Thousands of them. The longest signing line of my life and nobody from the LitFest to see 'Mr Three Signers' doing a serious session. Emiratis, Brits, Pakistanis, Jordanians, South Africans, Indians. A real rainbow. My hand hurt by the time the last grin disappeared away off the stage.

I do love the dear old LitFest. Really.

Back to Skool - Let The LitFest Fun Commence

I love school visits. They're sort of part of being at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature. You don't have to do them but there's a lot of effort put into integrating the Festival with local schools and authors are asked if they will drop by a school or two and give a talk to students.

I always jump at the chance. I get to behave like I'm a real author and everything. The faculty usually gets a bit twitchy, because I don't do 'PC' so well, but it normally comes right in the end. I try and use the opportunities as something of a sales pitch to get students thinking about writing their own stories. It's not just about thinking you've got a book in you: narrative is a powerful tool in communications and story-telling permeates pretty much everything we get up to in the nasty, commercial world we're bringing up our kids to inhabit.

Which is sort of funny, given our mums always told us that telling stories was a bad thing to do.

Tomorrow I'm off to Al Ain, where two groups of students from Brighton College are going to spend an hour or two with a strange, shouty man bawling incoherently at them. Next week it's English College and Pristine Private School. I'll be testing the surfaces for dust at that last one.

It's hard to believe, but we're only two sleeps from the LitFest - that fine bonanza of all things narrative, bookish and even literary. 140 writers from 25 countries are set to workshop, panel session, chat, sign books and generally delight something like 37,000 visitors. This year's Festival theme is 'time' and there's a huge programme planned which will take place across two weeks, both over at Shindaga and at the Intercon Festival City where the main programme takes place.

The Festival has grown like a mad thing over the few years it's been running. It's created new writers and seen people getting publishing contracts, start writing for themselves and expand into writing for others.

People have been self-publishing books, forming writers' groups, book clubs and generally enjoying books all the more. The Festival has, in short, triggered all sorts of growth in the literary scene in the UAE and even beyond in the wider Arab world.

The increasing focus on the Arabic programme has created a new opportunity to expand readership and contemporary literature in a language that has seen all too little focus on literature in recent years.

We've seen UAE-based writers clinching publishing contracts, new writers emerging and a vibrancy in the literary scene here which simply didn't exist before the Festival started taking place.

And all because a lady with a bookshop in Dubai woke up one day and thought 'Wouldn't it be lovely to have a literature festival?'

It's staggering, really...

Birdkill And The Gifted Kids. So What's Your IQ?

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

She tried her luck at testing Hamilton’s assertion there was absolutely no fraternisation between the research and teaching staffs. ‘Oh. Do the research staff not join us?’

Archer looked as if she had just enquired after the health of a dead relative. ‘We don’t really, well, talk to each other. It’s not encouraged, you see. They do their jobs, we do ours and the general consensus is we’re both better off not influencing the other.’

‘I see.’ Robyn made sure it was clear she didn't. ‘It seems odd to meet for drinks on a Thursday. Most schools I've been to; they wait until the end of the week.’

‘Oh. Right. I would have thought Lawrence would have explained that to you as well. We have a four-day week here. You get to spend Friday planning your lessons. We often have an informal staff meeting in the afternoon to share any issues or ensure we’re coordinating properly. That’s on top of the Monday co-ordination meeting, of course.’

‘Of course.’

He glanced up at her to see if she was laughing at him and smiled thinly. ‘It works well; you’re not going to be teaching a primary or even secondary curriculum. Most of the kids are at university level, some are capable of taking a decent Master’s. But their emotional development is very mixed indeed. You’ll be dealing with kids who have an adult’s learning with a child’s experience. Believe me, you’ll need the planning time.’

The kids in Birdkill are part of a program of research into battlefield augmentation, filing off to the Hamilton Institute's mysterious domes at night to have their brilliance harnessed and turned into weapons. Robyn, her mind already stretched by managing the trauma in her past that has triggered her selective amnesia, has to try and manage a class of these brilliant young things - particularly difficult with Martin leading the charge to oppose her. As she fights for stability, he tries to push her over the edge. She struggles with her guilt at fighting for shallow victories over a mere child, but he's beyond a child - and he's vicious.

These kids are more than extra-ordinary. They're savants. Off the scale intelligences whose minds are able to do things we can't quite grasp. But what IS intelligence?

I've long held that IQ tests measure our ability to do IQ tests. They don't measure creative intelligence at all and tend to favour logical thought. I've often confronted tests that have more than one possible answer, too, which is annoying.

I will never forget (or forgive) my primary teacher holding up a square piece of paper that had been torn in two diagonally and asking me which half was bigger. I looked carefully and the left hand one had been torn so the ragged edge had slightly more papery prominences than inlets. The left hand one, I told the teacher, who then gave me her scorn. Two halves are the same, numbwit. I burned with impotent rage. They're not. The left one was bigger. They're not.

When it comes to a measure of intelligence, there are better models than logic tests, specifically those based on Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences - that intelligence might be a number of capabilities or aptitudes and measurable only on multiple scales. For instance, Gardner's eight abilities: musical–rhythmic, visual–spatial, verbal–linguistic, logical–mathematical, bodily–kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic. The last wasn't one of the original set, Gardner later added the intelligence of the naturalist, which is fascinating - an ability to manage the natural world with unusual 'intelligence'.

That's a long way from 'complete this number line' testing.

But when you have people of exceptional capability in an educational environment, wherever that capability may lie, you're failing them if you don't 'differentiate' - that's the technique teachers use to plan a lesson in multiple streams: these kids can do the simple task, these kids can be stretched further, these kids can be really pushed. It's an incredibly hard job, herding 25 cats into three or four groups all doing something different.

And then there's Johnny, who can do all this work with his eyes closed and who, despite being in the top set all the time, is bored and behaves badly because he is frustrated. He might not be a great mathematician, but he's a way better artist than the other kids. Or he may be on a spectrum, a numerical whizz who has absolutely no people skills or ability to interact or manage interaction but who can manipulate numbers in a way a talented adult would struggle to match.

We're too used to pigeon-holing people based on IQ. Have you taken an IQ test? What's yours? Do you care? Did you care enough to join an organisation like MENSA so you could celebrate your success at taking an intelligence test? Did it make you feel good? I'm honestly, genuinely interested...

If not, then here. Fill your IQ boots. You can leave your result in the comments!

Birdkill, Space And Starting Writing

'What started you writing?' It's a question I've come to dread. I want to print out the answer on a sheet of A4 and have it ready to hand it over to the journalist asking that most lazy of questions to put to a writer. It's like when you get married and want to punch the 50th person who asks you what married life's like. And then I feel guilty, because someone asking you questions is a good thing. The alternative, nobody asking you questions, isn't so good for book promotion, capisce?

I love the story of Prince Philip, returning from an overseas trip, who is accosted by a cub journalist who somehow has made his way to the front of the scrum and attracted his attention.
'Prince Philip sir! Prince Philip sir!' Our hero has a recorder held out.
The bushy-browed figure leans down towards his tormentor. 'Yes?'
Our man is rather like a dog chasing a car, in that now he has his prize, he doesn't quite know what to do with it. He gathers himself manfully. 'H-How was your flight, sir?'
Philip smiles. 'Have you ever flown yourself, young man?'
Our man is puzzled. 'Yes, sir. Many times.'
'Well, it was just like that.' Says Philip, turning on his heel and moving on.

I didn't have an idea what I was going to write, really, only that I had a vague notion of spoofing those international thrillers where our man is chased across Europe by a shadowy cabal of evil wrong-doers, saves humanity and gets the girl. The book would be amusing, only because I am easily bored and essentially shallow and so thought myself incapable of writing something literary and nuanced. According to my Amazon reviews for the resulting novel, Space, I'm also incapable of writing a funny book.

And yet it still makes me laugh when I read it today. It's often irredeemably silly, it makes a number of errors I have since learned to spot and remove from my writing and it makes the, in conventional publishing terms, fundamental error of not taking itself - or its reader - too seriously. And yet there's a sort of cry of 'Yahoooooo' about it, think small boy kicking autumn leaves and you're half-way there. The book has energy, ambition and a delightful way of killing off cherished characters that I must admit I have rather retained.

There are a number of high points that still tickle me pink. The police interview with a suburban housewife who has lost the ten inch 'thing' from her bedroom drawer, sold to her by the gorgeous and pneumatic sex worker Kylie - who is without a single brain cell to bother her - still cracks me up (remember I'm fundamentally weak-minded). There's the divorced copper with a perspiration problem and the poor middle-class doctor who is the unwilling victim of 99% of the book's set-ups. The angriest policeman in England is quite fun, counterpointed by Ivan Litvanoff, a particularly evil Russian spy. His encounter with Nigel, a camp MI5 safe-house housekeeper with a Prince Albert, ends with a most satisfying gag. A particular high for me was black leather cat-suited CIA operative Neon Womb, who has a 'moment' every time she kills. She was my female side coming out. Oh, and I'm forgetting the house-cleaning spy from Vientiane, the vengeful Véronique. Not to mention former French resistance fighter René the Horse, the character who featured in the short story that was my first attempt to write a book. He had to have a place in Space, and so he does. Oh! And grumpy handbag-wielding galleon Mrs Bartholdy...

Oh, gosh. There's quite a lot in there, really. It's amazing what you can do with 100,000 words when you put your mind to it...

Anyway, I'm rambling. Space is free on Amazon.com from noon today for the next five days. So if you want a free copy (saving you £0.99, cheapskate) or want to let a friend know they can get a copy, fill your boots. I'm not claiming the book's perfect or representative of my later, more serious work, right? But you can let me know how it went for you by leaving a review and I won't mind at all. Even if you don't think it's funny...

Birdkill And The Science Of Making Better People

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

"There is now no reasonable excuse for refusing to face the fact that nothing but a eugenics religion can save our civilisation from the fate that has overtaken all previous civilisations."

George Bernard Shaw

The idea that we can somehow shape the betterment of our species has long held scientists in thrall. And yet we are still chilled by the efforts of the Nazis and others who ventured into the territory of human enhancement through selective breeding. It's fine to breed and cross dogs or horses, to transplant trees and splice varieties to create disease resistant, hardier and larger fruit and vegetables. But when you start doing that with people, the overwhelming majority of us feel a line is being crossed.

Eugenics is, in short, a dirty word.

Although thinkers way back in human history toyed with the idea - the soldiers of Sparta were an early example of hardy stock applied to a task, as I suppose the Nepalese Gurkhas are today - it wasn't until the Victorians happened by that we started playing with the idea of improving the human gene pool by spaying the insane and sterilising the less than perfect humans out there. Armed with calipers to measure people's heads and various other dubious 'sciences' to categorise people in nice, easy boxes that conformed to Victorian ideals of human perfection, a number of organisations around the world sprang up around the world, all espousing the spurious ideals of eugenics.

We like to think of it as a uniquely German invention, but it wasn't. The Eugenics Education Society of London was formed in 1907; the American Eugenics Society in 1912 and the French Eugenics Society in the same year. They were joined by the Belfast based Irish Eugenics Society: British perceptions of the Irish as a nation of sub-human, troglodyte beings and Catholic notions of shame were to morph through the C20th into the vile social experiment we would come to know as the Magdalene Laundries. At their heart, the ideals of eugenics; cleansing humanity of those too weak or afflicted to defend themselves against the perfect puritans of Victorian society.

I propose to show in this book that a man's natural abilities are derived by inheritance, under exactly the same limitations as are the form and physical features of the whole organic world. Consequently, as it is easy, notwithstanding those limitations, to obtain by careful selection a permanent breed of dogs or horses gifted with peculiar powers of running, or of doing anything else, so it would be quite practicable to produce a highly gifted race of men by judicious marriages during several consecutive generations.

Introduction to Hereditary Genius by Francis Galton (1869)

Galton's book would have graced the library in Lawrence Hamilton's cosy study at the Hamilton Institute, the setting of Birdkill. He would have taken it down and cupped its leather spine in his hand as he soaked up the great man's words, because Hamilton, too, believed in creating a highly gifted race. With a mixture of breeding, chemical augmentation, training and experimentation into the workings of the human mind, Hamilton's work is funded because he has said he can produce better, more effective soldiers.

He is Robyn's rather dubious host as she tries to embark on her new start in a life so recently torn apart by a nameless terror...

Birdkill launches at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature on the 1st March 2016 where copies will be on sale. If you can't wait, it's available now in paperback here and as an ebook to pre-order here.

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...

Crime Across Continents: How to Catch A Killer

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The second panel session wot I am doing at the wonderful Emirates Airline Festival of Literature is titled Crime Across Continents: How to Catch A Killer.

Moderated with insight, wit and dexerity by savage old Irishman James Mullan, I'll be joined by Chris Carter and Sebastian Fitzek. The session takes place on Saturday 12 March, from 11.30-12.30 at the Al Ras 1 room at the InterContinental Festival City.

Our brief is to talk about how we create really bad baddies. And how we bring them to justice. I'm not entirely sure about the justice bit, but we'll try and muddle along.

Chris writes books about very nasty people. More about him here. His eight books based around psychologist turned detective Robert Hunter have propelled him to top the UK best-seller lists and have chilled hundreds of thousands of readers to the bone.

Sebastian is one of Germany's top crime writers, all seven of his novels have been German best-sellers and he is now crafting a fierce reputation in English markets as well - his novel about a ten year-old serial killer, The Child, was adapted for cinema and also released in the UK last year. More about him here.

And then there's me...

And Now the Hard Part: Getting Your Book Into Print And Onto Shelves

That's the title of the publishing type panel session I'm sitting on at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature 2016. The other gig I'm doing is also about acts of murder: I'm talking crime fiction with fellow criminal minds Christ Carter and Sebastian Fitzek.

I swear they just put me on these panels to cause trouble, but it keeps going wrong. I got put on one a few years ago with Luigi Bonomi only to find my plan of whacking him over the back of a head with a tyre lever washing up against the uncomfortable fact that he's one of the most pleasant, smiley people in publishing.

Similarly, last year I shared a stage with Orion supremo Kate Mills who turned out to be rather a love and not the mean old harridan I had psyched myself up to confront. We got on rather well, as it turns out, and agreed about a great deal more than we disagreed about.

When I started this here publishing journey, I was full of wide-eyed surety. I have posted before about the Dunning-Kruger effect and my long, slow realisation that publishing didn't want me. It used to make me angry, certainly self-publishing Olives - A Violent Romance was an act of fury triggered when my own agent couldn't be bothered to look at - let alone shop - the book.

But I've had so much fun since then, I don't really have that anger any more. Mainstream publishing doesn't want me and that's just fine: we can co-exist, ploughing our respective furrows in the rich soil that is the reading public. I'm a tad weary of promotion these days and really could use some help with marketing and getting 'reach' into markets outside the UAE, but I didn't even wait for my small test sample of agents to reject Birdkill before deciding to self-publish the book. I'm sort of done with the old cycle of submission and rejection. I have a life to lead.

For myself, I now believe that publishing doesn't want me because I don't sit comfortably topically. It's not about the quality of writing, characterisation and other technical stuff. It's because the things that interest me don't immediately scream 'mainstream appeal' - the Middle East, the grey areas of morality, bad guys you empathise with, good guys who are weak-minded, men dying of cancer and betrayal and retired IRA bombers don't top agents' lists of books just made to sell themselves. And yet I clearly have a readership - the sellout local book sales, rave reviews, feedback from book clubs and all the other good stuff that's been happening tell me that.

I think the million dollar question facing this panel is not really so much 'how do you get an agent and publisher', there have arguably been too many words thrown into the wind about those two topics for any of us to have anything more useful to say on the topic.

For me the question is more, 'What's the secret sauce? What makes book A a soaraway bestseller and book B a guaranteed dud?' Century and Arrow publisher Selina Walker, who gave us 50 Shades of Grey, and Jonathan Lloyd, who heads major agency Curtis Brown, should certainly have some answers. And our fellow panellist Sean Fay Wolf, whose Minecraft themed fan fiction got him picked up by Harper, has undoubtedly tasted of that elusive sauce.

The question is finding it and amplifying it. And that's where I think this panel will be so interesting. The publishers on the panel will either have cracked it or be foundering, as clueless as I as to how you do this thing in the atomised world of the Web and its Medusine long tails. Finding out which of the two states they inhabit are itself be a thing of great fascination.

I'm not setting out to misbehave this year. But I can promise you this panel will be nothing less than mesmerising and insightful. This based on the other panellists, clearly...

The panel is linked here if you want to buy tickets at Dhs70 each. If not...

How To Start Writing A Book

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I've posted in times past on how to write a book. I've posted about how to edit a book - and most certainly how to publish a book, as well as my own booky journey. And I've posted a lot about book marketing. I've probably posted about how to murder a publisher, too.

But I've never talked about how you actually start a book. You know, how you sort of decide you want to do it then knuckle down and actually get on with it. That moment when you realise, 'Here I am. I'm actually doing this. I'm writing a book!' is something else. But how do you, you know, get there?

And so @dollz87 on Twitter made a good point today. It's all very well talking about this here Emirates Airline Festival of Literature 2016 'How to get your book published' session wot I'm taking part in, but how DO you stop talking about writing a book and actually start writing a book?

For myself, I had a couple of false starts. I most certainly had not the faintest idea of what writing a book entails. It's probably lucky I didn't, because I'd probably have found something more destructive and less intelligent to do instead. My first book 'Space' started with me writing a scene set outside the Pompidou Centre in Paris. I had a character, René the Horse, in mind. I wrote about 1,500 words and then the file sat on my Toshiba T1600 (showing my age, but it was one flash puppy of a PC to own back in those days) for years as it rotted in my brother in law's attic. It's still there, for all I know...

When I eventually decided to write a book, I sort of had René in mind, but I had to get from the start of a book over to him in Paris. I dreamed up the idea of an auto-manifesting chicken and started writing...

The chicken appeared on the kitchen worktop with a percussive ‘pop’, interrupting Ben Jonson’s rummage in the fridge for something to eat before afternoon surgery. There was little on offer: stale bread, no butter and a pot of slightly mouldy jam. Scanning the kitchen for the source of the noise, Ben found himself looking at a particularly magnificent roasted chicken on a ceramic dish. It was occupying a space that had previously contained neither chicken nor dish.

A soft hissing sound fizzled into silence. The chicken was plump, still warm and its rich, savoury fragrance filled the air. Ben’s mouth pricked with saliva. He’d eaten nothing since yesterday lunchtime and now he was looking at a glistening, freshly roasted chicken. 

Licking his lips, partly from animal lust and partly from apprehension, Ben scanned the room. Just a kitchen. He looked up. Just a kitchen ceiling. 

The disconnect overwhelmed Ben’s response to sudden bounty. He felt like a laboratory mouse: If you press this button, food appears. His mind raced, grasping for explanations like a lunatic reaching for butterflies. This was wrong. The chicken had failed to follow due process. Chickens are born in hatcheries, raised in farms. De-beaked, plucked, dipped, shocked, slashed, racked, packed and stacked, bagged, bought, stored, stuffed, cooked and scoffed. They know their place, do chickens: they’re food. Except he hadn’t bought this chicken, and he hadn’t cooked this chicken. This was new chicken. Inexplicable chicken. Chicken á la quiz. He reached across to the oven and opened the door. It was cold.

You can buy 'Space' here for 99p. It still makes me laugh, I must confess.

And so I was away. 100,000 words later, I leaned back with a sigh of satisfaction and decided I deserved a Martini. Space was written and I could now unleash my genius on literary London. The rest, as they say, was pants.

But how do you START? I've got news for you. It's really easy. Here's my $1mn super secret writer's tip: just start. Get it down on paper, at least the first few pages. Start writing. Now begin to think about what it is you're building here. Ideally, sketch out the big idea and then break it down into chapters, building your big idea in an outline. Don't stop writing while you're doing this, keep the momentum going. Don't put off writing to do planning, but write as you plan. The further ahead you plan, the better, but don't stop writing, whatever you do.

Start by writing down your opening scene. Don't sweat this too much, it'll likely never make it to the final cut, but make a start. Finish whatever you write in that first session and have a think about where you want to take it next. Start again with the next session and read over what you wrote before, then take up the quill again and write more. Repeat.

Scope out a 'writing time' for yourself. For me, it's first thing in the morning before the office wakens (I spend half an hour thinking in the car and then an hour writing. I'll write in the evenings as well when I can. Morning me leaves notes for evening me. I write on Fridays, too. I'm married to a teacher, so she spends Fridays planning. We're happy enough, both beavering away in our study.). You're looking at giving yourself a daily 1,000 words to write. You don't have to DO this, but have it as a target. 400 well written and considered words that resolve a problem are better than 1,000 sketchy ones that leave you with a problem later on, believe me. But if you end the week 7,000 words to the wise, give yourself a massive pat on the back.

Don't tweet, don't let yourself get distracted. Switch the Internet off. Just concentrate on that story, the big picture one, the scenes you're building and the story you want to tell. Think about things when you're not writing, dream up characters and their backgrounds, their stories and their lives. Steal quirks from people. Keep writing. Every day. Even a few words. Keep writing. Keep writing.

And you'll do it. Trust me, you'll do it. Don't bother with NaNoWriMo type deadlines, that's a sure-fire route to a rubbish book and a huge editing job (an editor friend dreads the end of NaNoWriMo because he knows what sort of MSs are going to start dropping on him). Stick to your 1,000 words a day as best you can and just plug away at it.

Believe me. The second you've started, you're on the way to finishing. By the fourth or fifth second you're committed. A couple of minutes in, you're carving your way to success. A few days in and you're a writer, writing. Don't worry too much about all that show don't tell sort of stuff (maybe have a read of this here handy post), or even worrying about POV and other writing techniques for now (there's time for that later), but focus on telling your story.

Once you've given those first few days to it, you're on the way to redemption. It's just like giving up smoking, but in reverse. And that's how I did it: I gave up smoking and my novel became my new obsession.

Just remember the golden rule: start now. Seriously. Right now. Close this window and open Word, take a deep breath and just write something. There. You've started. You can worry about the rest later. If you need a shoulder to cry on, it's @alexandermcnabb. But NOT in your writing time, hear me?

Good luck!

Birdkill And The 2016 Emirates Airline Festival Of Literature

Birdkill launches on the 1st March - I may have forgotten to mention that? If I did, sorry. This coincides with the first day of the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature 2016 in Dubai, UAE. The book will be on sale in paperback at said LitFest, as well as online.

I will also be infesting da LitFest, this year. I'm taking part in two panels, so here are the details if you want to avoid them:

Crime Across Continents: How to catch a killer
Saturday 12 March, 11.30am-12.30pm Al Ras 1, InterContinental

Chris Carter's Robert Hunter books are set in LA. Sebastian Fitzek’s 'Therapy' knocked the Da Vinci Code off the German no. 1 spot. Alexander McNabb you know very well, thank you.

The three of us are tasked with talking about what it is that makes a bad guy really, really bad and how, having made your really, really bad bad guy, you bring him to justice (or, in my case, just as likely let him away with it).

And Now the Hard Part: Getting Your Book into Print and onto Shelves 
Friday 11 March, 3.30pm-4.30pm Al Ras 2, InterContinental 

Sean Fay Wolfe self-published Minecraft FanFic novel Quest for Justice, which was picked up by HarperCollins. Jonathan Lloyd is Chairman of Literary Agency Curtis Brown. Alexander McNabb will be causing trouble at this one, I can tell you and Selina Walker is Publisher at Century and Arrow. She brought us Fifty Shades of Grey among other things.

Jonathan and Selina will tell you how to succeed in publishing, Sean will tell you about the unconventional route to success and I'll be talking about how not succeeding is not only an option, but thoroughly enjoyable for all that.

Come along, hurl abuse, heckle. Buy my books, they'll all be on sale in paperback, and I'll sign 'em. Form an orderly queue now, people...

Books - A Journey

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This is all totally irrelevant to anyone, anywhere, ever, but I thought I'd take the chance to document some stuff now I've finished another book and have a little time before I can face editing it.

My first completed novel was a rather silly affair called Space, which I reckon I started back in 2001, but probably only really started in the spring of 2002. The oldest archive files I can find for the book only date back to 2003.

The oldest book files I have are actually a backup of an unfinished novel called Booze - those date back to September 2001, so I must have started Booze then put it to one side to work on the the less controversial Space.

When I'd finished Space and shopped it to agents, being rewarded with a remarkable tally of rejections (by the time I gave up, I had over a hundred), I started back on Booze, a rather scurrilous tale about a Kuwaiti buying a monastery that holds the recipe to an aqua vitae that tastes like angels' tears and is as addictive as crack cocaine. I began to get messages back from agents that said things like 'Humour doesn't sell dear boy' and so the work in progress that was Booze got shelved and, indeed, lies gathering dust even now.

I'll finish it one of these days, it was great fun. Let us remember that I still think Space is funny - it made me laugh enough, re-reading it after all these years, to put it up on Amazon for sale at a princely £0.99. Its first review on Amazon pointed out that "...it just isn't very funny."

It's linked here for your cheap Kindle read buying pleasure!

So I wandered off and decided to write a serious book. The result, Olives - A Violent Romance, was originally written in September 2004, pre-dating - I always thought rather presciently - the 2005 Amman bombing by a year. However, the bombing in the original manuscript was a dream sequence.

The original MS starts...

The first day of my new life started out in the dark, dreary sodium wetness of Heathrow Airport and ended in a cell. Let’s just say things didn’t go according to plan. Now, months later and looking back to the start of my time in Jordan, I wonder that I stayed there at all. Part of me bitterly regrets not leaving the second I was released. But there’s a tiny glimmer of hope in me that won’t go away, although now I’ve run out of choices and the consequences of my actions are written in the wreckage around me. 

And was considerably improved by the large amounts of editing and rewriting that went on between then and 2011 when it was finally published. Most of these took place post-2007, when I discovered Harper Collins' Authonomy and met other writers who taught me how to write better books, principally Australian Italian novelist Phillippa Fioretti. Other than that, the whole Authonomy experience was, as I have documented extensively in earlier blog posts, pretty pants.

Beirut - An Explosive Thriller was started in Autumn 2009 after the 'reader' for an agent called Eve White, who had requested a 'full read' of Olives had finally responded that it was all 'A bit too low key' for them. I was in a fury. The book's crammed with spies and bombs and shit and it's too low key?

That was it. The final straw. I was going to write a mad book and it was going to be based in Beirut. The first versions of Olives had Paul moving to Beirut, looked after by Gerald Lynch (who at that time was called Nigel Soames, a character who nagged at me because he wasn't 'working'), who felt guilty at the way things had panned out for the feckless young journalist. Beirut just made all sorts of sense as a location. I chucked Prague, Hamburg, Spain, Malta and the Greek Islands into the soup mixture just to be sure.

Work on Beirut - An Explosive Thriller actually started with 'The Muezzin Cried', a short story I posted here on the blog, derived, as usual, from a dream memory.

By December 2009 I had realised I was actually going to have to go back to Beirut if I was going to pull this one off. I had been travelling there since the '90s, but hadn't been back in a few years. I needed to refresh my memories and impressions of that sexiest of Eastern Mediterranean cities.

At the time, I had been involved in running a social un-event for online people in Dubai called GeekFest. I called a friend in Lebanon, Alex Tohme, and asked her if she'd be up for running GeekFest Beirut? Of course, she was totally up for it. And so I had my ticket to Beirut sorted!

On the 6th February 2009 GeekFest Beirut took place and I spent a few halcyon days striding around the city often in the company of old friend and partner in crime Eman Hussein. Thanks to GeekFest, I had 'my' city in the 'can'. I went back again for ArabNet with colleague and friend Maha Mahdy, discovering Barometre in the process thanks to geek and blogger Roba Al Assi. And again for GeekFest 3.0. And again, and again. The gorgeous Paul Mouawad Museum, the model for Michel Freij's own private museum, I discovered for myself.

It was with Maha that I went in search of Shemlan, the village nestled high in the Chouf that was home to the 'British Spy School' MECAS - The Middle East Centre for Arab Studies. I was to go back time and again, with the lovely Micheline Hazou and then also with friends Eman and Sara Refai. This village and an inspirational gentleman called Barry were to combine in the person of one Jason Hartmoor, the anti-hero of Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy.

Work on Shemlan actually started back in 2011 but was postponed because I decided to self-publish Olives and that took 110% of my time, back in November 2011. Beirut followed in September 2012.

By early 2013 - having visited Estonia, the location of the book's finale - I restarted work on Shemlan and it went like a rocket. I raced to the mad, climactic and rather unusual end of the book, propelled by death metal and much musical mayhem. I sent it off to my agent and when he responded, weeks later, that he wasn't even going to try shopping it to publishers, I terminated our relationship.

Boy, did that feel good.

Shemlan was published on 1 November 2013. I didn't publish a book in 2014, I spent the year wrestling with A Simple Irish Farmer and quite a lot of existential self publishing angst. Olives and Beirut have sold quite well, but Shemlan - easily the best of the three books - was plagued by the fact I didn't do a UAE print run and was too exhausted by the whole farrago of promotion to actually get out there and market the thing. Shemlan has been terribly - and unfairly - neglected as a consequence.

Seriously. I can't even look at a book blog now. If I see the words, 'I love books and...' one more time, I'll burn the puppy. Big brown eyes or no big brown eyes...

I've written a screenplay for Olives since. I just don't know what to do with that, so it's in a desk drawer. It was fun to do!

So here I am, fifteen years into my journey as a writer of books. I have one more book now finished, being steadily rejected by a number of agents. That's taken, as I have documented earlier, a year to write. And I have another new book to edit now, which took about a month to write. If traditional publishing turns both books down, as I confidently predict they will, I shall self publish them in September this year (A Simple Irish Farmer) and March next year (the newnew book) to coincide with the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature.

And after that, I reckon, I'll be hanging up my literary shoes...

How To Make Books

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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.

Emirates LitFest 2015 Author Lineup Shock Horror

They've been and gone and done it. Last night in a glittering gala event with thousands of sizzling gypsies, the LitFest gang announced the 2015 lineup of authors who'll be workshopping, talking, panel sessioning and generally bringing books, poetry and literature in general to life.

I will, as usual, be infesting the event. The full list of authors is here, so I'm not going to attempt to list them here or pick favourites, but I will point out that Yrsa Sigurðardóttir is my top name of the whole wild and wacky bunch.

One of the things I've been tasked with at the MENA.Online.Literature.Today conference in Cairo (Did I mention I'm going to Cairo?) is talking about the LitFest and its impact on literature and publishing in the UAE and that'll be a sheer pleasure. I've made no secret of the fact I think the Festival has been transformational and has been responsible for the creation of a growing community of writers and people who think they can actually make something of the book they thought they had in them.

It's an important event, as well as a highly anticipated, lively and, well, jolly one. So now you know, block the 3-7 March and save up for the sessions you'll be attending.

I'm thinking of hiring a signing line this year. I've had enough of the sitting by yourself next to a chattering excited stream of people clutching someone else's books as they wait to have it scrawled on by the smiling, relaxed person sat next to me. Last year it was Lynda LaPlante. The press of punters stretched to infinity. I tried to get my queue to shuffle around and look longer, but they got fed up with me shouting at them and the man left while the young couple realised they were in the wrong line...

Dubai World Trade Centre Hosts A Very Literary Lunch

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Back in the days when men were men, women were interested and dinosaurs roamed the earth, the Dubai World Trade Club sat atop the tallest building in the whole Middle East. It was an invitation-only members gaffe limited to CIPs (commercially important people) and they kept a tie in a drawer at reception in case you, for some inexplicable reason, had forgotten to wear your own.

If you got lost in Dubai (a frequent occurrence for me in those days), you just used the Trade Centre tower as a landmark. It was instantly visible from anywhere in the city.

Of course nowadays the Dubai World Trade Centre tower is tiny, a 33-floor dwarf nestled amongst giants. It's made of good old fashioned poured concrete, none of yer modern high tech skyscraper construction techniques here. If you flew a plane into this trade centre, it'd just splat on the outside - a parabellum fired at a Chobham armoured tank - before sliding down like Wile E. Coyote hitting a canyon wall.

Even the lobby reminds me of Dubai in the 1980s, staying at the Dubai Hilton* and going to bloody GITEX. Meeting the girl who was to become my wife. All that sort of stuff. This is a building that has always had tremendous resonance for me.

So it's going to be interesting (for me if nobody else) to go there on the 8th November and discuss the sense of place and its role in novels. This is a place, one of only a few in Dubai, I'd argue, that truly reflects the synthesis of place and time. This is where Rashid started the march to a global city. If you were to ask me to name three key monuments to Dubai's remarkable recent history, I'd show you a tiny treadmill crane on the Bur Dubai creekside, the World Trade Centre and Port Rashid. I'll cheat - I'd probably take you for a walk around Shindaga and Ghubeiba too.

Although the 33rd at the Trade Centre no longer keeps a tie behind reception, it's just as swanky today as it ever was. The private dining rooms are still there, the old prints on the walls and lavish furnishings remain. It's been dickied up and modernised. And the kitchen still whisks together culinary marvels - the food here has always been stunning.

Dubai's Sheikh Zayed road photographed from the Dubai World Trade Centre in 1991. 

Yeah, tell me about it...

Why the 8th? Together with writer of Cornish romance novels Liz Fenwick, I'm joining moderator Lara Matossian for a 'Literary Lunch' event at DWTC. You're more than welcome to come - a three course lunch and 'beverages' can be yours for Dhs175, as well as the joy of listening to the lovely Lara trying to get me to talk some sort of sense. The idea is to discuss, as I said earlier, the concept of place in novels, Liz with her Cornish fascination and me with a clear link to a rather murderous Levant (which I'll soon blow nicely by finishing a novel set in Ireland, but that's a worry for the marketing team, right?), what with Olives and Beirut and Shemlan and all that.

The gig starts at 12.30pm. To book, you just pop an email to wtc@dwtc.com or call 04 309 7979.

On the same day, from 10.30am to about 4pm, I'll be at the ExpatWoman Festive Family Fair over at Arabian Ranches together with scatalogically challenged kids' author Rachel Hamilton (she wot got a contract as a result of the Montegrappa First Fiction competition at the Emirates LitFest) and we'll be signing - and selling (natch) books there all day. How I intend to clone myself is the subject of another post.

They asked me for my preferences when they were composing the menu. I don't know what they've done with the resulting feedback, but I can't wait to see. A chef of genius led by a dolt will sometimes create something different and entertaining.

See you there!

*The Hilton Dubai used to be a four-story building linked to the DWTC tower and was more '70s than Pink Floyd. It was demolished in 2007.

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'.