Empty Quarter

Oh, dear. Three months have passed and no post at all.

Is the Fake Plastic blog dead?

As Hemlock pointed out the other day, most of the other old UAE blogs have died. Do all blogs die one day? I suppose so - people get bored, move on, grow up, whatever. You realise that the volume of effort that goes into posting is increasingly indefensible. And that your 'hot take' on the world may well amuse you, but it's hardly worth sharing every day. As the lovely young things of Instagram are only just finding - and we found years ago - that whole sharing everything starts to become an end in itself and it doesn't really make much sense in real life.

The Fat Expat Blog was a lot of fun, for instance, but it just took too much out of us. Other UAE foodie blogs rose up from more talented people with more time on their hands.

And, increasingly, I've found I don't need to vent on here so much. I don't really need an audience (I never thought I needed one, but in reality I liked having one. A bit like Geekfest, that one - if it becomes important to you, it's probably time to stop doing it). It's not that there aren't things to vent about - my last visa renewal was a little shop of horrors, but then we all have horrible visa renewals, no?

I've got a new book in the offing, so it'd be nice to do that whole sort of 'It's important to keep the blog going as an author promotion platform' thing but then that makes you, the reader, the tool for my ambition (I'm using you, in other words, to promote my book) and it also doesn't work very well (a few, a very, very few people have read my books because they've liked my blog. It's likely in the tens, though. This is not a book promotion panacea, you understand. I'm not Boris Akunin, for instance, whose blog can pull six or ten thousand comments per post!).

I could blog about my book writing, publishing and production experience of course, but then a) it's not very interesting and b) see using people point above. I have issues laying out my content stall because I want to make people behave in a certain way ('Buy my book'). Yes, yes, I know I never had issues with that before, but I'm a different person now. Honest. No, really. I swear.

Also, please note, book posts have always been a HUGE downer on the blog. I post about whales having belly buttons or the awful shite that Tim Horton's put in their 'coffee' and you're looking at multiple thousands, even tens of thousands, of page views. Book post? A thousand or so if you're lucky and a LOT of tumbleweed knocking around.

As eny fule no, a thousand views put into the formula proposed by McNabb's Law of Clicks means a picobook is sold. It's hardly worth it, really, is it?

Anyway, I may well post again if and when the fancy takes me - but I'm clearly no longer in the 'post a day' league, as we can all see.

Meanwhile, you can always find me, of course, on Twitter!

Fake Plastic Souks Is Ten

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Oh golly, oh gosh! I nearly missed it. Happy Birthday, Fake Plastic Souks! Ten years ago this month, I was sufficiently intrigued by the idea of expressing my opinion without using a pseudonym (at the time the standard approach for bloggers in Dubai) and was also missing writing magazine articles (I used to do a lot of that) enough to contemplate starting a blog. It's hard to imagine today, but back then it was all, well, terribly experimental. Now, of course, it's quaintly retro.

It all followed on from another experiment in online scribbling, a Wiki called 'Orientations' I had started to put together, which played with the idea of creating a hyperlinked series of articles that led you on an adventure, a little like playing Colossal Caves, around what was something of a stream of consciousness. PB Works, the nice people wot hosts the Wiki, have been threatening to take back that workspace for years and yet the crumbling ruins of that largely incomplete experiment still exist. The first word of the first post on Fake Plastic Souks linked, through the fiendishly clever use of houmus, back to the Wiki in a sort of nod to the past.

Here's the first Fake Plastic Souks post, linked for your clicking pleasure!

That first post was inspired by the sententious rumblings from the Arab Media Forum and amused me greatly. Like many things that amuse me greatly (my first novel, for instance), I find I am in an audience of one. Luckily, that has never detracted from my amusement. The ability to amuse oneself avoids a great deal of unpleasantness in life, I find.

An awful lot of water has flowed under the bridge since those early days, quite a lot of the events which took place around me documented as I jotted things down. It's not quite Samuel Pepys, but I occasionally enjoy stumbling across something old and dusty. In all this time, a tad over 1.2 million pages have been read. Which is nice. I would hate to think how many words I've thrown into this little cloudy corner. I've probably written about 700,000 words in my various novels (not including the two books I made from FPS posts for publishing workshop purposes) and likely more in the blog.

Oh yes, the books. There were two of them, made when I needed a text to create a sample book for a 'hands on' publishing session I did for the LitFest chaps. The first one documented 2007-2009: Fake Plastic Souks - The Glory Years. I joked that I'd do another one if that book sold more than ten copies and to my mild amazement, it did. So I made the second, Fake Plastic Souks - The Fear Returns, which covered 2009-2011. The links take you to the Kindle editions, but there are also paperbacks. I never did get around to a third one. Just as well, probably.

It all seems a little irrelevant these days. Mind you, an early and perhaps over-passionate proponent of 'social media', I now find myself yearning to sit under a tree and play with wooden toys rather than post, share, tweet and snap for the benefit of small and frequently mildly bemused audiences.

I think my favourite things from over the years are were when I 'outed' Harper Collins' Authonomy and the 'Shiny' posts, which did rather tickle me. Documenting the egregious contents of Tim Horton's French Vanilla Coffee not only provided me with amusement, it has informed something like 10,000 people. The 'stuff they put in our food' posts have always caused the most 'Yews'. My abiding interest in food, of course, led to the co-creation of Dubai's first 'food blog' with partner in crime Simon McCrum, The Fat Expat. That was finally shuttered due to lack of time and photographic talent back in 2013. TFE was never really Instagram gold, but I still use it to find recipes even today.

These days, as people may have noticed, I post rather more infrequently and have stopped looking at Sitemeter or analytics. In the early days, the blog would attract a sort of 'background radiation' of readers, about 30 or so per post. That grew to hundreds and even thousands, with anything up to 40,000 page views each month. I was just starting to think that was getting rather reasonable when I met Russian writer Boris Akunin, whose blog gets about 1,000 comments a day. When he invited readers to join him in a walk around Moscow to protest Putin, 10,000 people turned up.

I was duly humbled.

Anyway, there's no real point to this post. I just thought I'd mark the occasion...

The STILL Blog And Birdkill's Cover

Birdkill written, I needed a cover image for the book. The title was simple enough, the original short story was called 'Martin', but having made such a mess of my previous book titles (Note to authors: naming your book after a popular food category means a lifetime of SEO fail) I wanted to get this one right. A brief flirtation with 'The boy who killed birds' ended in 'Birdkill'.

I started a-Googlin' for cover images (without any real idea in mind) and soon enough stumbled upon Mary Jo Hoffman's 'STILL Blog', where her image of a lifeless Fox Sparrow was to be found: the perfect cover image. I can't remember what search string got the result, but have a sneaky suspicion it was something fiendishly complicated like 'dead sparrow'...

A quick email exchange later, said image was licensed to me, a process I had been through before with the 'Pill skull' cover image of Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy, which I licensed from Australian artist and borderline head case Gerrard King.

Mary Jo's work is starting to gain the mainstream recognition it deserves, having build a solid wee following on instagram (@maryjohoffman) and with visitors to the STILL Blog itself. A number of people and companies, including major US retailers now, have started licensing her images.

The idea behind STILL is simple enough. Formerly an aerospace engineer, Mary Jo stepped out of the world of fast-moving corporate careers to have kids and enjoy a somewhat more bucolic lifestyle. These days she takes her Puggle, Jack, for a walk every day and forages in the pretty countryside around her rather stylish home in Saint Paul, Minnesota. She takes the results home and adds them to her collection of things, arranging these natural finds and taking a daily snap for her blog. She'll occasionally pull in objects from further afield as the family roams. She's got a great eye and creates images of abiding perfection: daily moments that truly give you a sense of stillness.

Sometimes it'll be a single object, sometimes a painstakingly arranged array artistically and beautifully laid out to produce an effect or tell a little visual joke. Her images provide a moment of contemplation each day, sometimes seasonal and sometimes vibrant, lively and filled with freshness. Warm autumn, stark winter and all year round, every now and then, a little death. They're all photographed using natural light.

Like many things that have happened to me on this book journey, the STILL connection has given me a fascinating new insight into something I hadn't known was there before.

I caught up with Mary Jo and grilled her lightly with a little salt and pepper and olive oil about the STILL project and her life in images...

You transitioned from being an aerospace engineer at Honeywell to a stay-at-home mum. How?
I did indeed. I worked in as an aerospace research engineer for 15 years. My area of expertise was flight controls (aka autopilots). By the time I left, I was Director of Research with offices in Minneapolis, Prague, China, and Phoenix.

I loved the work, but the job required too much travel, and was seriously getting in the way of our ability to have children. I was told, in so many words, “Right now, you’re married to your husband. When you take your next promotion, you will be married to the company.” Then, as if on cue, the beloved and virtuous company I had worked for up to that point was bought out by a large, uninteresting, and mostly uncaring corporate conglomerate. So, before it was too late, I quit.

My husband and I essentially tag teamed. I had been the primary bread-winner, and he had always been part time, and now we switched roles. It has been 13 years since then, and we have two incredible kids. I don’t regret the choice often, but I sometimes miss all those smart guys I used to work alongside. Fortunately my husband is not only my best friend but also the smartest guy I know, so I am content hanging with him and the kids as long as they are willing to hang out with me. 

Would you describe your life and surroundings as idyllic? 
The word “idyllic" makes me uncomfortable, because it implies a kind of ideal. I don’t think of our life as ideal. I think of my life as a combination of happy, earned, and fortunate. In summary, I am happily married to a guy I am crazy about, and have been for 25 years. Together we made two pretty remarkable kids. When we were young and in love, and I was making a good income as an aerospace engineer, we continued to live like college students because we simply didn’t want for more. So we saved much of that professional salary for over a decade. That financial security has given us lifestyle flexibility today that we could not have imagined in our 20s. It was one of the smartest things we ever did.

On the flipside, and there is always a flipside, I have a hereditary autoimmune disease called Sjögren's syndrome. Today it is mostly a nuisance, but it could get ugly at any time. When I was young, I was a tomboy and athlete, but today a good six kilometre walk is about as much as I can reasonably do. So those two things: a hint of financial security and a nagging sense of time as precious and finite, have led us to be more deliberate about our lifestyle than most of our peers.

My surroundings, however, I just found out, are very nearly idyllic. I recently learned from Dennis Dutton's TED Talk that there is such thing as a universally idyllic landscape shared by all cultures around the globe.

He describes this universal archetypal landscape as follows:

"People in very different cultures all over the world tend to like a particular kind of landscape, a landscape that just happens to be similar to the Pleistocene savannas where we evolved. It's a kind of Hudson River school landscape featuring open spaces of low grasses interspersed with copses of trees. The trees, by the way, are often preferred if they fork near the ground, that is to say, if they're trees you could scramble up if you were in a tight fix. The landscape shows the presence of water directly in view, or evidence of water in a bluish distance, indications of animal or bird life as well as diverse greenery. And finally -- get this -- a path or a road, perhaps a riverbank or a shoreline, that extends into the distance, almost inviting you to follow it. This landscape type is regarded as beautiful, even by people in countries that don't have it. The ideal savanna landscape is one of the clearest examples where human beings everywhere find beauty in similar visual experience.”

This just happens to describe the land around our home in every way, right down to the copses of trees that fork at the base, lush greenery, abundant wildlife, and a path through the cat-tails out to a bluish lake in the distance. So, somewhere in my amygdala, I must have known this when we bought our home ten years ago. This setting has been a huge source of my inspiration.

There's a transcendent quality to the images you post daily on the STILL Blog and a tremendous sense of peace. Does that reflect your own peace or are you a howling maelstrom of conflict and terrifying possibility underneath? 
While it would sound much more interesting to hint at a howling maelstrom of inner conflict, I have to disappoint you and say it just ain’t so. I have always had a pretty firm sense of who I am, what I want, and what “normal” looks like. I love art. But I don’t really have demons. If there is a peacefulness to my images, I think it comes from a deliberate attempt to separate myself from the craziness that is much of contemporary media and modern consumer culture. The nature I focus on is a healing force, waiting to be paid attention to, if we can tune out the computer, the daily news, and the exhortations of advertising.

You have said the blog is images of things you pick up on your daily walks. Do you find yourself being forced to forage every day now? Do you ever wonder what it would be like to walk aimlessly again? 
My walking and gathering is still a joy. I never think of it as a job or a necessity. But arranging the images and processing the photos, now that I’m in my fifth year, can occasionally feel like one too many things to fit into my day. There are some days when I would like to wake up, open a book, demand a steady stream of lattes, and never leave my bed.

US retailers Target and West Elm (the Pottery Barn people) have picked up your work for licensing. Do you worry you might get so caught up in the commercialisation of your work that you lose the very essence of time and peace that have presumably led to its creation? 
That’s a very astute question. And the answer is both yes and no. The truth is that the commercial work has already gotten in the way. I did a lot of the design work for the Target products in particular. And for several days before each major deliverable I would spend whole days at the computer preparing image files and would often forego my daily walk.

I also found it hard over the last year to quickly shift from left-brain activities like meeting deliverable deadlines, to right-brain activities like being attentive on my walks and then really seeing my found object so that I could photograph it in an original way. I believe it is possible to train the brain to quickly shift between these two modes, but I haven't gotten there yet. However, I am not so concerned about this for the long run. The piling up of two major retail launches occurring simultaneously is not likely to happen again. I hope there will be more opportunities like these in the future, but as long they are reasonably staggered, I am confident I can have my cake and eat it too. 

My book's got your dead sparrow on it. Is that a first for you? 
Is it my first image on a book cover? No. Is it my first dead animal photo on a book cover? Yes. I think I have sold three images to publishers for book covers, and probably about half a dozen images for book covers to individuals who are self publishing. The STILL images have been used in more ways than I could have ever imagined. Some of the examples that pop to mind include: animation characters for kid’s educational videos, an LGBT poster, Royal Opera banners, Smithsonian lectures, 2 master’s theses, Trend catalogues, product packaging, wine labels, company logos, magazine covers, and countless tattoos.

What's the story of this particular unfortunate bird? 
This little fox sparrow hit our glass door. I still feel kind of bad about it. We’ve lived in our current home for ten years. We would get the occasional bird that hits the glass windows, but it was fairly rare. And they were often dazed, but not killed. Then, two years ago, I had the windows professionally cleaned for the first time. And to make matters worse, I did it in spring, right when all the migratory birds were passing through our area.

Well, it was sort of a blood bath. In the previous eight years we’d only had maybe six bird deaths, but that spring, we probably had six in a matter of weeks. I vowed to never get my windows cleaned again.

There's a lot of death in STILL. Would you like to comment? 
There is indeed. An Italian art zine publisher recently produced a zine on death, and asked me to submit some dead animal photos. So I went through my archive and found over forty images of dead animals. I had no idea I had that many. It should be obvious, but focusing on nature does not always mean Monet water lilies and Van Gogh sunflower fields.

Everything in nature dies, and if you spend enough time there, dead things simply become part of the landscape, and coming across them becomes part of experiencing that landscape. They are often some of my favourite images—with a lot of peacefulness, beauty and grace. In all cases, the animals were found already deceased, and, I hope you agree, have been respectfully commemorated.

Will you get bored with it? Do you have other projects in your back pocket? 
Another insightful question. Will I get bored? Maybe. Probably. Some day. But I’m not yet. Maybe I’ll become like a crazy cat lady, and instead of 27 cats, I’ll have 27 years of doing daily STILL images. Doing STILL has been such an unexpected life enhancer, in part I think because of the hyper-attentiveness it requires, that I am in no hurry to quit. But I am in my fifth year now, and I am feeling the itch to change it up in order to continue to grow creatively.

I don’t have any brilliant projects in my back pocket. I wish I did, I have tried out a few ideas, but nothing has stuck yet. I can’t decide if I will evolve this project or if I will put a period on it by commemorating it with a book. Ultimately, I would like to create something similar in its dailiness, but new in its form and expression.

You can follow Mary Jo on Pinterest, Instagram or RSS the STILL blog here.

Above: The making of the Birdkill cover image!

Dubai Foodie Fashionistas Unite!

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I got an email this week from somebody announcing they were a 'Dubai-based foodie fashionista' and letting me know they were starting a blog if I needed any publicity.

I get a lot of random emails from people wanting publicity because I'm on a list operated by a company called Cision, which offers a subscription based service to PR people. Cision is quite a powerful tool, but often lazily used by PRs, who just blanket mail everyone they can find, rather than using Cision's segmentation tools. So, although I'm on Cision as a 'blogger', I'll frequently get 'Dear Editor' emails or invitations to 'cover' someone's event, job move or new self-adjusting dimplex.

Actually, I also often get 'Dear,' emails. And now and then, in moments of solid gold, 'Dear blogger'.

What, dear flak?

I also get emails hoping I've had a lovely weekend from people I don't know who don't seem to think that strangers hoping you've had a good weekend - or are having a great day - sound perhaps just the teeniest, tiniest tad bit insincere.

Don't get me wrong, I don't have an issue with this email thing. It's occasionally quite interesting. I get emails telling me about new wireless routers, carwashing 'solutions', touristic events in Abu Dhabi and hotel launches. I get a large number of press releases written by people who are clearly witless, drooling clowns on behalf of clients who are wasting good money with bad marketing, poor targeting and communications that shouldn't be tolerated beyond primary school. I am often amused by these, in the dark way that the Darwin Awards are amusing, or someone dying horribly while using a selfie stick. I know, I know. You couldn't make it up, could you?

But a Dubai foodie fashionista trolling me for freebies (which is what 'foodie fashionista' is secret code for) is a new departure. The very idea of a bloated Mr Creosote in a rose-patterned tea dress is enjoyment enough. Not, you understand, that my idea of fashion is a rose-patterned tea dress. My concept of fashion, as Sarah would gleefully inform you, is far, far worse than that.

That someone would self-identify as a Dubai-based foodie fashionista is glorious. What do you do, then, Bill? Oh, I'm a welder. Why, what do you get up to? Oh, I'm a Dubai-based foodie fashionista. Oh, right. Nice, if you can get the work...

Anyway, I deleted the email.

Writing Inspirations: I Stole This From Roba

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I first met Jordanian blogger, trouble maker and Converse-loving spectacle rack Roba Al-Assi at the inaugural ArabNet Beirut. She's a sweetie. She was never to know that I am a habitual thief and stealer of people and souls.

Like wot I said, I'm doing a series of workshoppy talky things at the Canadian University in Dubai on the subject of writing, editing and publishing books. That, along with the WIP, has Mr Head pretty solidly in Bookland. And the writing workshop had me yowling manically at my audience of mildly concerned-looking students about writing scenes as if you're there: the feeling of a cold key in your pocket, the smell of summer barasti, the crackle of logs on a fire. That kind of thing.

Which took me right back to 2010, when I was writing Beirut - An Explosive Thriller and stumbled across a post on Roba's mighty blog, And Far Away. It was to become the soundtrack to the whole scene between Nathalie and Maalouf in the Casino du Liban. The post is linked here for your viewing pleasure. Roba's blog, incidentally, rarely fails to charm and delight.

The idea was basically to get you to open three tabs on your browser with three links. One here, the second one here and this here one here. I'm a simple bear, the whole thing delighted me and I had it playing as I started tapping out the characters that would form the words that would become my characters. It was still playing as I smacked the last full stop of the scene and shoved back my chair with a happy sigh.

Incidentally, it was also Roba who introduced me to Bar O Metre, the packed (and engagingly skanky) student bar on the margins of AUB which I didn't hesitate to steal for the scene where Lynch nabs the evil 'Spike'.

But it was the soundtrack thing that got me. I've posted before about how music is such an influence for me when I'm writing. And right now I'm doing an awful lot of Afro Celt Sound System and The Frames. For what it's worth...

Life Is Just Dandy

(Photo credit: _DaniloRamos)

Or if you prefer to be Amerikee about it, everything is awesome. I've been very offline for the past six weeks. It's been ginormous fun.

I've been cooking or playing iPad games in my spare time. Mediocre Software's Smash Hit is the William Gibson of iPad games. It's so stylish it aches. I've done some writing, but not as much as I should. I have been pretty much steering clear of Twitter, almost totally off Facebook, nowhere near LinkedIn and haven't bothered updating Google+.

The stunning news is I have not only survived this appalling withdrawal but thrived on it. What's more, I find myself now increasingly disinclined to spend much time on any of them. It all seems like so much effort for so very little return. It's like book promotion. Which I have also assiduously eschewed.

Twitter, previously known as the second love of my life, now mildly revolts me. I'm tempted to block all the novelists endlessly tweeting reviews of their books and punting out spammy 'buy my books' tweets. And no, I didn't do that all the time myself, thank you. I always mixed content in a discerning and respectful way. At least after Olives...

I used to find the links people shared on Twitter fascinating and insightful. Most of them are now BuzzFeed and Mashable. I can RSS that stuff, thanks. I'm bored of lists of ten things you didn't know you could do with a dried Aardvark's testicle.

I haven't pushed, promoted or punted Shemlan at all. Consequently, it hasn't sold a copy this month. Not one. And I do not care. Jashanmal has got sick of holding stock of Olives and Beirut at its warehouse (Narain has left to join Facebook so I have lost my 'sponsor' in high places). So look out for a giveaway promo soon. Virgin, Kino and WH Smith have all placed orders, which is cool.

Which is all fine by me. Experiment over, move on.

Khaleej Times published this rather sweet interview with me, which made me briefly something of a celebrity at the Radisson Blu Sharjah, where I go to relax or be chivvied around a gym, depending on which day it is. It's linked here if you're curious.

Anyway, next week and the week after I'm doing a series of workshops for groups of students at the Canadian University of Dubai. In case you are, or know of a, student there, they are as follows:

How to Write a Book
Sunday May 18 10:00-12:00 PM
Tuesday May 20 12:00-2:00 PM

Editing your work
Wednesday, May 21 2:00-4:00 PM
Thursday May 22 10:00-12:00 PM

Self-Publishing
Monday May 26 2:00-4:00 PM
Tuesday, May 27 12:00-2:00 PM

The usual two hours of screaming abuse from an addled lunatic with Tourettes is on offer. No emolument or remuneration is sought by the author or presenter. Dima Yousef at the University is co-ordinating things.

Salaam.

Of Lacunae

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I think this is the longest I've ever left the blog unattended and it really shows - there are weeds growing in the cracks, a general feeling of shabbiness and disrepair and the guttering has come away from the side of the wall, leaving a green mossy trail in its wake. Sweeping up has taken quite a time, I can tell you.

I've been busy, particularly over the past week with the arrival of the Oirish contingent bearing with them The Niece From Heaven and her little sister, who's nine months old today. To say things have been hectic would be to understate matters considerably. It's amazing how much space and time a four year old and a baby occupy. We've been mucking around in the usual haunts, from feeding goats at Sharjah's Arabia's Wildlife Centre to discovering Dubai's unsung penguin colony, the little group in Dubai Mall's aquarium which make the Mall of the Emirates penguins look like a good idea.

We've also been doing 'pool days', reminding me I live somewhere people travel to when they go on holiday. You sort of forget that when you're living the day to day life or dashing off on leave back home or somewhere else.

I've also started a new book. There simply aren't enough hours to go around...

Fake Plastic Souks - The Fear Returns

I've gone and done it again. I couldn't help myself. I've published another collection of 'best of' posts from years passim of this marginal, silly little blog. At the time I did the first volume as a test file for a self-publishing workshop, I joked that if I sold more than ten copies I'd do a second volume. And the first volume has, amazingly, sold significantly more than ten copies. It might even run into the twenties.

The cover image of Fake Plastic Souks - The Fear Returns is taken, as the blog's header and the cover shot of the first volume are, in the Aleppo souk. If you ever doubted Jarvis Cocker's wisdom - everybody hates a tourist - you can see it reflected in the faces of these gentlemen, interrupted in their centuries-old ritual of making fatayer by me and my trusty EOS. I wondered, working on the cover file, what had happened to them and whether they had survived the destruction of that glorious old souk. If you want to get a taste of the timeless alleyways of the C14th Ottoman labyrinth, you have to go no further than buying a copy of that most excellent Middle Eastern spy thriller, Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy.

The book starts off well, with the story of an Irish building worker whose mobile falls into the hands of police. Trouble was, he'd forgotten taking some spoof shots of him and his mates hooning around with a replica AK47. So plod had him followed around Europe for two weeks as they waged war on terror and our hero just went on an adventurous and boozy holiday. It's a true story, too!

2009-2011 sees us finally realising there's a crisis and the British press ganging up to sling mud at Dubai while it's good and down. Shiny posts crop up as everyone starts to realise the difference between usufruct and freehold, while various inane pronunciations are made then inevitably clarified. I share more of my love for banks and call centres, including a most amusing spoof of 'ten tips for call centres' which the bloke I was parodying was kind enough to not only acknowledge but link to! There's quite a lot of Gulf News slappery, more than I remembered doling out, including the results of deploying my rather fetching Dhs19 weighing scales bought from Lals when I realised GN was looking decidedly Kate Moss these days.

All in all I found it a great deal more amusing than I can remember it being at the time - certainly funnier than the rot I'm posting these days. If you fancy a trip down memory lane and the odd laugh, you can part with £0.77 at this handy link here and have it on your Kindle or your Kindle for iPad app within seconds. If you're in the US and would rather spend $0.99, it's linked here.

If you're in love with paperbacks, that's coming but it takes a few days to populate the Amazon paperback story. Similarly B&N, Kobo and iBooks.

And, yes, if this does over ten copies (making me a princely £3.50) I'll do volume three...

Salam, Bloggers! The Arabian Nights Village in Abu Dhabi wants you!

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It's one of the most witless emails I've received in a long time, from a company calling itself 'Smart Comms' and a bloke who's given himself the job title 'Digital Scientist'. You can tell we're in trouble already, can't you?

David, the digital scientist, wants to offer all UAE bloggers the chance to qualify for a free-of-charge stay at the 'Arabian Nights Village', apparently a one of a kind cultural experience in Abu Dhabi. That's it, that's all the detail in the email. All bloggers have to do to 'qualify' is send David a list of their social media followers, specifically:

1) Unique Monthly Visitors to your Blog:
2) Twitter followers:
3) Instagram followers:
4) Facebook fans:
5) Other Social media footprint?

Based on these numbers, presumably - rather than any qualitative or content based analysis, David will work his 'digital science' and select bloggers to join in the 'exciting activities' at Arabian Nights Village.

Presumably David will find this post one day as he trawls the UAE's blogs to find new victims for his 'digital science'. So here's a message for him that is infinitely more satisfying than replying to his email.

Look, David. I don't want to go to 'Arabian Nights Village'. I don't know what it is, what it does, what it's like or even who's behind it. I'm not particularly interested, but you've hardly piqued any shred of residual interest I might have had. I certainly don't want to "take a first-class Desert Safari and stay in houses inspired by Emirati lifestyles from throughout the ages" - not that I'm uninterested in Emirati culture, far from it. But from the tone of your mail, I have the nasty feeling that whatever 'experience' you're offering consists of being hauled around with a ring through my nose and being forced to endure a number of humiliating encounters with something lacklustre before being beasted into posting about it in awed and gushing prose that you would, ideally, dictate. I could be wrong, but that's a chance I'm taking.

I have very little interest indeed in responding to your invitation to validate myself to you by proving I have sufficient followers, friends or other online contacts to jump over your arbitrary bar. Why on earth you thought spamming every blogger/social contact you could scrape from the web with a mail like this would get you any result other than opprobrium, I don't know. I mean, you didn't even take the trouble to address me by name or contact me in any way prior to this. What on earth did you think you were doing? What in the name of all that's chocolate flavoured did you think the 'social' is there in 'social media' for?

Maybe you'll get lucky - maybe there's some rube out there who'll trade his/her twenty followers for a night out with you and your village. But, for the record, David, it's a 'no thanks' from me. Best of luck with other 'bloggers'...

Huffington Post Reviews Blog Shock Horror

When I hammered the best (IMHO) bits of the first two years of this blog into a book for a self-publishing workshop thingy I was giving over at Dubai's uber-funky hangout The Archive, the last thing I thought was that it would aspire to the lofty heights of a review in the Huffington Post.

Well, it has. You can read that very review here.

When you've finished, you can buy the book here for your Kindle or here for your iPad or other tablet. The good news is that it'll cost you the brave sum of $0.99...

Indian Lecturer Held By Dubai Police For Defamation

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Gulf News' Bassma Al Jandaly reports today on the case of an Indian university lecturer who has been held by Dubai police, while on a visit to the country, for defamation. Arrested on the 5th May, two weeks later he's still in Dubai, out on bail but with his visa held by police.

The lecturer worked for a "private university" in Dubai's Academic City. According to the story in GN, police confirmed the man had his contract terminated without reason by the university - Dubai courts found in his favour and he had received his end of service benefits.

However, returning to India, the lecturer appears to have indulged in the activity known as the grinding of the axe. I think I found his blog, which makes for highly entertaining reading and lets the university have it in no uncertain terms with remarkable vigour and an almost obsessive degree of staying power. Although comments are turned off and the YouTube videos have been made private, the rest of the content is up there and there is certainly plenty of 'masala' on offer.

The university's response was apparently to lodge a defamation case against the man at Rashidiya police station. And so when he travelled from the US, where he is based according to GN, to the UK and stopped off to see his Dubai-based wife, his collar was comprehensively felt.

In a rare moment of sheer cravenness I'm not going to link to his blog because I can't be entirely sure this is indeed the blog in question (given there are no names in the story, I found a blog that seems to fit the bill quite nicely by Googling "dubai university lecturer india end of service", as you would) and I'd rather not be joining him over at Rashidiya nick trying to defend myself against a charge of sharing links to material alleged to be defamatory.

It's interesting (and noteworthy bloggers, tweeters and all you other online commentators - as I pointed out in my last post, in fact) that in the UAE, defamation remains a criminal rather than civil matter. Now covered by the provisions of the UAE's cyber crime law, the mere accusation of online defamation has resulted in this man's liberty being taken from him. He can now look forward to a lengthy and expensive trial process unless the defamation case is dropped.

In choosing this course of action, I would argue that The University That Must Not Be Named has ensured greater reputational harm will ensue from this affair than if it had chosen not to pursue a criminal case of defamation in the UAE.

However, in the meantime, our lecturer friend would appear to be in rather a lot of hot water...

Favourite Things

 (Photo credit: Aureusbay)

I had reason to have a quick rummage around in the blog archives recently and was mildly surprised to find myself being entertained by an earlier incarnation of me writing six years ago.

It's funny how much has changed in that time - and at the same time how little. Here are a few of my favourite things from the early days of that archive. I might find a few more one of the days...

Here's one on 'The Deal'. I was going to post about this the other day and had forgotten discussing the topic before. The Deal is what you sign up to when you become an expat in the UAE. So how has The Deal changed?

Not for the first time, I railed at the quality of local journalism in this post. The ill-fated Emirates 24x7 newspaper had embarked on a campaign to 'save the wadi fish' and I was sore amazed...

"The summer is upon us and the relentless tide of infinite-eyed, grinning evil is around the corner." My first post about the little yellow thingy that accompanies Dubai Summer Surprises. It has to be said, the little chap has been a great deal less prevalent than in years passim, but the "relentless tide of infinite-eyed, grinning evil" phrase has rather stayed with me...

This post about our Green Day themed dustbin made me chuckle, I must confess.

But of the early posts here on FPS, this one here contains the real money shot. The advice at the end of it is priceless indeed...

How To Sell To UAE Bloggers

I'm doing quite a lot of 'how to'ing recently, am't I? Don't worry, this isn't a book post...

This advice doesn't come from someone that runs amazing professional 'blogger outreach' programs because I don't really do very much of that. It comes from the other end of the horse - the blogger at the receiving end end.

While it's lovely to find you have been added to the Cision media distribution list and positively feted by PR people, many of the approaches seem to miss some reasonably basic thinking when it comes to seeking the engagement of people with blogs, popular Twitter accounts or much-liked Facebook pages. So these pointers might be helpful for future approaches.

1) Bloggers are people too.
I almost fell into the trap of labelling this one 'bloggers are not journalists' but this misses the fact that journalists (no matter how it goes against the grain to admit this) are also people. Little I have to say about approaching bloggers doesn't also apply to approaching journalists.

So by saying we're people too, what do I mean? I mean, for instance, that it would be nice if the approach were individual to me rather than generic. Saying you enjoy my thought-provoking blog is all very nice, but that hardly tells me you actually give a hoot or have ever read anything I have written.

If you had, you'd be aware that I'm much more likely to bite you than let you pat me on the head.

I am naturally going to feel more interested in helping you out if you've been a regular reader/commenter on this blog. Even a few words referring to why you think this blog would be interested in your new perfume line for dogs - ideally linked to some content I have posted here - would let me know you've at least had a stab at mapping the relevance of what you do to what I do. Shared interest is good. Irrelevance is bad.

2) Bloggers aren't there to cover your products
I know, it's amazing isn't it? But the majority of what I write in this blog is peculiar to me and the world around me. Inviting me to the Armani hotel to attend the launch of a new range of bamboo shopping trolleys will not have me gushing and bright-eyed at the prospect of going to such a wonderful place. I have never written about bamboo shopping trolleys before and have exhibited no interest in these items in the past (although now I'm quite sure Klout will include it in my areas of expertise and I'll own the category in search).    I don't write about products or review products. Ten minutes spent browsing the blog would mark me as a non-target for shopping trolley launches.

Fashion and food bloggers are more susceptible to these types of invitation if they relate to fashion or food and if they are somehow interesting and/or innovative. Food product launches are not likely to cut it. Fashion bloggers are (sorry guys, but you are) incredibly spoiled and will need something out of the ordinary or a great relationship having been established.

3) Bloggers have day jobs
There are few people in the Middle East making money out of blogging to the extent they don't have to earn money by doing something conventional like, say, working. So a Tuesday afternoon event is likely to be out of the question - an all-day gig mid-week, even if it's exciting and deeply tempting, will likely not cut ze mustard. We have jobs to go to. That means if you want to organise an amazing all-day event targeting bloggers, you'll probably have to work on a Friday. Altogether now? Aaaahhh.

4) Slowly slowly catchee monkey
An individual approach that is contextual will be much more likely to reap rewards than scatter-gun event invites. A great example here is how Nokia's PR agency, d'Abo & Co, used my recent highly public Twitter meltdown with my HTC Android mobile (there's nothing like a mobile perma-crashing and telling you it's 'quietly brilliant' every time it staggers back to its feet to get a chap's goat) to slip a Nokia Lumia into my life. It was a risky strategy, they had to have had real confidence in that product - but, having the expectation I'd hate the Lumia I actually loved it and didn't mind saying so. I don't feel beholden to them for lending me a mobile, but I did think their timing and smart approach was very well managed. I don't mean to be difficult, but I am generally brand antithetic. Some bloggers I am sure will love brands. Love 'em to death. Positively fawn over  'em. Let me know when you find one, eh?

So it's a matter of monitoring conversations (blogs, Twitter, Facebook, whatever) and mapping out your influencers (who IS an influencer?) before making an approach that is generally, as with any conversation, led by a contribution of some sort. Give forward to earn a place at the table.

By the way, most UAE blogs have relatively small readerships.

5) Build a community by being a member of the community
What is an influencer? A Klout score? Number of followers? Number of comments? You need to establish some metrics to decide at what level of influence it's worthwhile bringing someone onside - because you'll need to invest in the relationship. It's not a one-hit thing, the key word is the R one - relationship. Approaching a person, inviting their involvement and engagement with you, facilitating that engagement and maintaining a respectful (ie not 'we're targeting product messages at you because we think people listen to you') dialogue. That way you can bring influencers on board, typically one by one, and maintain that conversation to the point where you actually could organise a tweetup or other event and people would be happy to come. That'll take time and investment, but it's so much more effective than pumping out generic materials in the hope that bloggers will slavishly act as botnets for your product messages.

That's my 2p worth. I genuinely hope marketers out there find it useful.

We're Back, Baby!

delete (Photo credit: M i x y)

You can only begin to imagine the look on my face when I pootled over to the blog yesterday to put up a post for the day (I was going to whinge about the new Salik gates, for what it's worth) and found the cheery words from Google (in Arabic, of course, because they insist on showing Arabic content to someone whose account preferences specify English) that my blog had been deleted. To give Google some credit, it was thanks to Google Translate I was able to find out what the hell the note the Space On The Internet Formally Known As My Blog (SPOTIFKAMB to IT people) meant.

Deleted. Gone. All of it.

It took a while to sink in. This blog has become a part of my life in ways I would never have thought possible. I've been feeding it words like a remorseless Tamagochi since I started it (as a frustrated writer who missed journalism) in April 2007, when I posted about the Arab Media Forum (This here post, in fact) to a readership of approximately three. I've been posting more or less regularly ever since - a body of work that stretches back, I realised as I made my way to the Blogger Forum to try and get some help, six years now. In all, over a thousand posts from rants about mendacious food companies through half-baked observations on the state of our media to book plugging now populate this dusty corner of the Web and I have become quite fond of it.

Every day a few hundred or so people pop by to hang out and most of them use the ashtrays and everything. Some posts have attracted thousands and thousands of readers - the ones where I expose the crap people put in their food and drink are posts I am particularly proud have attracted such attention, because I think it's important more people are made aware that Subway bread contains gunk, Aquafina is tap water and other great truths.

Why did Google do it? They never do tell you, but an educated guess (fuelled by some panicky reading yesterday) would be some sort of spammer/hacker exploit that meant a number of blogs (the UAE Community Blog and SeaBee's 'Life In Dubai' were also affected and a number of other blogs were complaining of unfair deletion about the same time I was) got trashed.

A number of people kindly suggested on Twitter that I migrate to Wordpress. Thanks for the suggestions, but it did feel a little like when you tweet about a PC problem and all the iZombies come crawling out to intone 'Buy a Mac' in their little, dead zombie voices. I like that blogger is the Barney of the blogging world, a sort of Little Tikes easy to use thing in nice, primary colours. Wordpress is far too complicated for me and I have neither the time nor inclination to build my own templates and other stuff. I gave up playing around under the bonnet of technology years ago and have no hankering to go back.

I did come away from the experience with the definite feeling that Google's fighting a 24x7 bot-war against the hackers, spammers and other manifestations of absolute evil. Occasionally that results in a few carbon based life forms getting squished. The only thing I can say is they unsquished me pretty quickly - so thanks to Nitecruzer, the entity that seems to do most of the management of anguished bloggers at the Blogger Forum. He could perhaps be politer, but this is a man tested with a constant dialogue with pissed off bloggers, so you can see how he might be occasionally inclined to testiness.

Anyway, drama over. Back to the usual hooning around and complaining about stuff... Move on, people, there's nothing to see here. Come along, now. Let's be having yer. And take those shinies with you...