On Writing Books

Quill (Photo credit: campra)

There you are, head thoroughly in the clouds. You're in the middle of a rainy day in Thurles, Co. Tipperary. It's cold and there's a wind - what they call in Ireland a 'lazy wind', the type that can't be bothered to go around you but goes straight through you. The thud of a car door sounds and footsteps scrunch on the wet tarmac. A man pulls his coat around himself and then you get a Man From Porlock.

It's like being torn out of your life and jettisoned instantly to another time and place, suddenly finding yourself in the 25th century in a massive space station, surrounded by little bald naked green men making strange inquisitive hooting noises and poking you. It's a moment of almost existential discontinuity.

Can't you see? You want to scream. I'm writing!

British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge it was, feverishly jotting down the vision he'd experienced during a particularly vivid opium binge, who was apparently interrupted by a knock on the door. It was the Man From Porlock, the nearby village. Coleridge dealt with his visitor and returned to his poetic vision only to find he'd forgotten the rest of it. The poem (It's the one that starts 'In Xanadu did Kubla Khan, a stately pleasure dome decree, where Alph the sacred river ran, through caverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea'. You can tell the years of being beasted by increasingly frustrated teachers weren't entirely wasted, can't you?) stands as one of the great creations of poesy, a fragmentary, brilliant thing. But it ends badly.

Sometimes it goes well and the words cascade off your fingertips like flicked butterflies. Sometimes you just sit staring at the screen and drooling. More often you wander off to Twitter, making some awful excuse about 'taking a break' or 'building one's author profile'. I might be lying about the latter, only a complete arse would think of Twitter as being any good for that.

But the worst thing in the world is when you're in your other world and the words are tumbling and someone thinks the scandalous price of broccoli is something that you need brought to your attention RIGHT NOW.

Apart from that, it's all going very smoothly, thank you. Taking a bit more research than I'd reckoned on, the story twisting in my hands like an over-excited anaconda with a sparkler up its bottom, but that's okay, that's how it goes.

All of which is my way of saying sorry for not posting very much, as if anyone cared whether or not I did anyway. And now, if you'll forgive me, I'm off back to a cold day in Tipp...

Shaheen The Camel. A New Gulf News High.

Gulf News is breathlessly presenting the World Cup match winner choices of 'Shaheen', a camel apparently blessed with octopus-like powers of footbally prescience. Or as GN puts it, 'our resident hump-backed football genius."

Shaheen is placed next to two signs, each representing a team about to play. Just in case we forget this is about football, the speculative ungulate has a football tied around its neck. Shaheen then picks a team by attacking one of the two signs, which appears to have been festooned with a sock dipped in the camel equivalent of catnip. Camelnip?

This is the top local story on Gulf News' website today. It confirmed something I have long held dear as a belief. I'll let you guess quite what that is...

HSBC IVR SNAFU

(Photo credit: lipjin)

HSBC has, in a moment of rare brilliance, broken its IVR. Not that it was ever an IVR to write home about in the first place, but now they've really cemented things and ensured it doesn't let you do telephone banking.

The one thing you'd want a telephone banking system to do, really. But then my expectations are probably set too high. Maybe I should expect my phone banking system to be set up to let me craunch a marmoset or perhaps provide me with philosophical inspiration. Because it sure as hell can't perform a transaction.

IVR is, in case you're interested, Interactive Voice Recognition. It's the phone system where.robotic.voices.tell.you.to.press.1.to.be.annoyed OR PRESS two.to.be.really.annoyed. It doesn't really have to be about voice, it can be keypad response. I'll never forget Rick Dees' highly amusing breast self examination hotline IVR gag: "Welcome to the Rick Dees breast self-examination hotline. Press one. Now press the other one."

Anyway, if you want to transfer money between accounts and you have multiple accounts (I do. There isn't enough room in one account to hold all the money I have, see?), you are now presented with a list of accounts to debit. Let us assume I want to transfer from my number two account to my number one account.

Foryour HSBC.UAE.Advance.Account.0...2...0...1...1..TWO...press ONE. For.other.accounts.press.two.

So you press two.

Foryour HSBC.UAE.current.account. ZERO....too...ZERO...WUN...ONE...2 press ONE.

So you press one.

Please.select.the.account.to.credit. Foryour HSBC.UAE.Savings.account.. 0..2...0...0...FIVE...0. Press ONE.

And that's it. You can't actually choose the account to credit and the account to debit. It's broken. Bust. Kaput. Borked. Non-functional. Usefully challenged. Without point. Eff all use.

So, heart heavy, you call the call centre. 

"Hello. Your IVR is broken."

"I'm sorry sir, I didn't understand you. Did you want to have your car washed, top up your credit card or craunch a marmoset?"

"No, I just want to tell someone at the bank that the new IVR is functionally broken. It won't let me transfer between accounts." I nearly say it's pining for the fjords but remember in time that you never, ever try to make a joke with the HSBC call centre or F16 strikes are called down on your house.

"I know the new IVR is complex sir and hard to understand and I appreciate your difficulty. Can I do the transfer for you?"

"But you're just reciting a script you've been given because of the high volume of complaints you're getting and that doesn't alter the fact or escalate the information to someone who could act on it that the IVR is actually functionally non-functional. Ineffective. Not fit for purpose."

"Yes. Umm. No. Is there anything else I can do for you today?"

They're taping the call. I hang up because I know what I want to say won't read well in the court transcript of my verbal abuse case.

I hate them. With a passion.

But then you know that...

Amazon, Createspace And When Customer Service Goes Heroic

So my third serious novel, Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy is only available online, there's no Middle East edition. Don't you just loathe people who start sentences with 'so'? Me too.

You can buy Shemlan as a paperback from Amazon.com (and the various Amazon dots), Barnes and Noble, The Book Depository or order it from any independent bookshop in the world by citing the ISBN number 978-1493621934.

It's a rather smashing book. I strongly suggest you do one of the above. The kitten might just make it through, see? This here handy link to the buy links for the book shows you where to get it as a paperback, Kindle ebook, Nook, on your iPad or, in fact, as any other ebook reader format ebook. But the paperback can be yours wherever you live, from Alaska to Kamtchatka. The Book Depository even ships it FREE OF CHARGE!

Do it now, you'll feel better. It's okay, I can wait. Here: I'll even do a reminder link.

Right? Great, thanks. Anyway, the reason you can buy Shemlan as a paperback anywhere in the world is because of a clever little Amazon owned operation called Createspace. Createspace allows authors to mount their book online and then prints out books to order using POD technology - Print (or Publish) On Demand. So they put an ISBN number in one end and a printed paperback with a nice glossy cover filled with wonderful words comes out, gets put in a shipping box, addressed to you and arrives a day or so later.

So when you hit that 'buy' link on Amazon or any other serioo book website, Createspace prints your book to order and despatches it to you.

A POD book is barely different enough from a booky book printed on novel paper for most readers to notice a difference. The quality is just fine.

It's all pretty marvellous, really.

However, there's trouble in paradise. People in the UAE hate buying books online - and Amazon hates selling ebooks to the Middle East. So most people don't bother buying the thing, they wait for me to have stock and buy 'em direct from me or just don't bother at all. For this reason - including a couple of upcoming events I'm doing - I bought 20 from Createspace earlier this year. They're more expensive to print than booky books, no surprises there, really, and so cost about Dhs30 a copy landed. That's too expensive to make traditional book distribution make any sense, 'cos disties take 50% and so with a cover price of Dhs60 dufus here doesn't make any money. Not, incidentally, that I have to. But I sell 'em direct and at signings and so on.

My books never turned up. I kept popping up at Sharjah Post Office so full of hope and optimism it was starting to remind me of back in the day when I used to go there to pick up the inevitable wodge of rejection slips. Months passed. Nada.

So I eventually told Createspace about it this week. And within the hour they'd mailed me back, said terribly sorry and promised to ship me a replacement batch out priority. I have to admit, I was impressed.

But that was nothing to how I felt today when DHL rocked up at the office with a box of 20 books. They DHLed them to me! How beyond the call of duty is that? I got my 20 books FOUR days later!

I emailed them to say thank you. They mailed back:

It is because of comments like yours that we strive to be the very best. Thank you for your very kind feedback! Without members like you, we could not continue to provide the service you have come to expect from us.

Your comments are greatly appreciated, and I sincerely thank you for choosing us for your self-publishing needs.  

Best regards,

Abu-Bakr
CreateSpace Member Services

Now you might call me easily impressed, but I'm blown away. Totally. I'm grinning like a Cheshire Cat who's just done a major hit of Amyl and found out in that very instant he's won the Lotto and Kate Bush is coming to tea naked.

If you want to buy a book, BTW, be my guest! Just hit me up at the usual @alexandermcnabb. I'm off to see if I can eat dinner with this grin in place.

How To Drool A Frog - More Weird And Wacky Searches

(Photo credit: thms.nl)

I occasionally dip into Sitemeter, the natty little analytics widget I don't use very much, to see what people have been searching to land themselves on this mouldy sub-corner of the Interwebs. I took such a dip today because I couldn't really get into the swing of writing for a while and decided to play a bit until the fancy once more took me to recommence my story of The Simple Irish Farmer, which is my WIP of choice.

I found that not a few people are clearly concerned about whether or not they put plastic in Subway bread - in fact thousands of them have Googled the topic and found themselves reading my take on the whole thing - their searches for truth leading them here. I find it very odd that a silly little blog like this can not only rank so high in search, but draw so many searchers for both this and the Tim Horton's French Vanilla Coffee is junk post. I am similarly pleased to say I have offered succour to thousands of punters who have been tearing their hair out at Chuck Norris the Trackpad on their Samsung S5 Ultrabooks.

Similarly, Sri Lanka Gems is a popular search term - and to my mild shock, my post about the gem and spice sales scams of Sri Lanka is number six result on Google. In the world. I mean, how mad is that? "Gemstones Sri Lanka" gets the same result, which I guess has Klout running around saying I'm influential about gemstones. A subject about which - I hasten to add - I am pretty much utterly bereft of knowledge let alone authority. A similar mind-boggling search anomaly is to be found in the phrase, "where did Nokia go wrong" which features this post on the first page of search results. And that's bonkers. Truly.

Somebody in Pakistan searched the Interwebs for the interesting-sounding "picrs sixi porn salik 17 21" which just led him here, which I am willing to wager a considerable sum was not the result he had in mind. Or even she, come to think of it. Apparently, online onanistic fortune favours the literate. And another rube got here by Googling "marage night fack movie". Were they after a fake movie or a fu... oh, never mind...

Search "online onanistic fortune". It's mine, all mine, precioussss...

Someone else was looking for a cartoon character curry - searching for "tom and jerry masalas", presumably to accompany a nice Daffy Duck Dosa. The searcher, rather worryingly based at Nokia's corporate headquarters over in Finland, got here instead. I say rather worryingly because you'd think they'd have a future to concern themselves about rather than playing about on Google looking for silly curries.

Another person arrived at La Blog by Googling "salmon farming in saudi arabia".

It's Yemen, dunce.

Then there are the surreal. I mean what did you think you'd get when you slammed "www.indianheroinafack blogspat.com" into Google? Blogspat. Love it. Interestingly, the 'perp' works for the Miller Brewing Company in Wisconsin, Milwaukee and was using a crappy old Nokia 5.0 browser. They got this for their troubles...

My favourite of this particular batch was the search term 'How to drool a frog' which really makes the mind boggle just a tad, but led its searcher to this post about HSBC's drooling incompetence. Which wasn't, I'm sure, what they were after. And no thank you, I don't want to know what they were actually looking for...

Any of them, come to think of it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book Review: Zero History

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It's terrible not to have the time for stuff and I'm increasingly struggling to cram everything in. I suppose the pressure of writing is foremost: when you're 'in the zone' everything becomes subordinate to your own work and the world you're building. When things jam up a little you end up on Twitter and infesting other places where the jobless and marginalised smoke up and drink cups of odiously strong tea. Reading has been relegated to a few minutes in the evening or snatched moments wandering around in a towel. There's no time for that curling up on the sofa stuff.

So it might be my fault entirely that William Gibson's Zero History was a labour of love to get through - I might have been introducing more interstices than any author deserves of a reader. It's the third in the 'Blue Ant' series, preceded by Pattern Recognition and Spook Country. All three books are built around a sort of now, perhaps a few months into our future at the time of writing but now, of course, a couple of years into the past. The drones featured in Zero History would have been very cutting edge and funky in 2010, when it was first published. Now they're more 'meh'...

Funny that Gibson's Neuromancer remains so startlingly futuristic and Zero History feels a little dated.

Ex rock star Hollis Henry and ex drug addict Milgrim are sent on missions to discover fashion coolness by multi squillionaire agency head and cool addict Hubertus Bigend. Bigend is interested in how military clothing achieves coolness in a circular relationship that injects street coolness back into military wear. Or something like that. He's saved Milgrim from his existentially threatening addiction only to make the man his tool - an echo, in fact, of the plot of Neuromancer and I did feel several times that Zero History was a cookie-cut of the Neuromancer arc.

Zero History lacks some of the flashes of descriptive brilliance that mark Gibson's earlier work. It doesn't come across as fresh and impelled, it doesn't compel the reader as much and meanders a lot. There are lots of blind alleys, scenes that don't actually seem to take us somewhere. The coolness becomes wearing, pressing down on you. Oh this is so cool, that's such a concept, this hotel/club is funky beyond even sehr funklich. Hollis' boyfriend, a cool military type, BASE jumps off the Burj Khalifa and I have to resist the urge to purge the whole damn book from my Kindle. The cause, the mission impelling the characters to their climax, seems rather, well, marginal. At the same time, there's a lot to love. The drug-autistic Milgrim, always somehow feeling a little two-dimensional, falls in love with Bigend's despatch rider and you find yourself rooting for him to get to root her. Bigend's a twat, but then when you've worked with Bigend types you'll maybe have less sympathy for that overwhelming control freak millionaire mentality.

An interesting read and a book that had me standing on occasion towel-wrapped and dripping onto the tiles as I tried to hold out to the end of the scene. And a book that lay on the bedside table for days, unloved as I read other stuff more immediately interesting (given the novel I'm working on, I'm spending a lot of time on the history of the IRA and the Irish Troubles). Not the book I'd recommend as a first Gibson novel. That remains, through all the years, Neuromancer.

Groundhog Day

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It's been one of those weeks. First we had the tremor from the Qeshm earthquake and then Google's Driverless Car.

The link?

Well, those few weird moments of seeming terrestrial liquefaction having been enjoyed, I then got to watch Gulf News tweeting that it was going to report on the thing I had just experienced as the rest of Twitter shared its rainbow reaction. As if I'm going to put my life on hold to wait for GN's report. The next day, almost 24 hours after I had watched friends and Twitter in general record their reactions to the event, I get to see news stories about the thing I had lived through the day before.

I had sort of moved on, actually. Including a wander around the internet to research a blog post in which I learned more about the incident and the factors behind it than the Gulf News story - that I hadn't been waiting for, funnily enough - eventually told me. Context and analysis? Don't make me laugh, cocky...

And then yesterday opened with news reports about Google's driverless car, a project most of the people I know had been aware of for some months. Things had moved on and Google had released pictures of its prototype 'level four' car - no steering wheel at all for you, matey. The news online had broken the day before, Google's release went out on the 27th May (Tuesday) and most online outlets led with the story yesterday first thing. So listening to the Business Breakfast on Dubai Eye Radio this morning, it was odd to hear some shouty Americans on Bloomberg being played out. A sort of strange, layered iterative experience - the presenters played a recording of Bloomberg playing a recording of an interview with Sergei Brin.

So I get to hear a recording of a recording of a person talking about the news I knew and saw the day before.

This sort of thing is happening so frequently now, I'm losing track of what day it is. I keep looking to the future only to find mainstream media dragging me back to the past.

Odd.

Dubai Earthquake Tremor Shock Horror

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There I am minding my own business yesterday and then wooah what was that? It's a strange feeling, like the ground just liquefied, your gut sort of goes googly and the Masafi on your desk is doing interference patterns. And you realise you're sitting in a skyscraper.

This is never a good time for the imaginative or fancifully inclined.

5.2 on the Moment Magnitude Scale, 10km below the island of Qeshm (which must have been a much more interesting place yesterday than Dubai), off the Iranian coast, the quake is by no means the first such event: recent major quakes taking place there include two biggies in 2005 and 2008.

By the way, I still call it the Richter Scale (as did most of the reporting media) but that's wrong. The MMS is a new scale developed to supercede the Richter Scale in the 1970s and although it uses a similar number scale to denote bigness, it's different to the one formulated by Mr Richter in the 1930s. Who knew?

Thirteen people died in the 2005 event (although Qeshm is relatively sparsely populated) which was a 5.8 event followed by 400 aftershocks. Another seven died in 2008, with a 5.9 event. Luckily there were no reports of casualties or fatalities from the Iranian News Agency yesterday. Note to self: don't buy a house on Qeshm.

Apparently Iran in general gets an average quake a day, sitting as it does on the convergence of the Arabian and Eurasian tectonic plates. Qeshm is a pretty criss-cross of anticlines and synclines - the region's complex geology is one of the reasons why we have all that lovely oil in the Gulf.

Twitter was fun to watch, Gulf News breathlessly tweeting that it was going to write a story about the event soon which was, if I am not much mistaken, a first. Watch this space because there's going to be some news about the news everyone's talking about already. Cool.

And some people left their buildings to stand next to them because it's clearly safer to be under a building than in it when the quake hits and everything falls over. This the media called 'evacuating'. Emirates 24x7 informed us that Sharjah Police had tweeted there was no damage, which was another new low for me. Like I need an online newspaper to tell me what Twitter's saying. Grief.

Anyway, I found this, which is quite cute. It's like FlightTracker but for earthquakes. So you can know when your earthquake has arrived. Or you can go to the horse's mouth - the National Centre for Meteorology and Seismology (say that after a long night).

Or maybe just go back to work and get over it, which is pretty much what we did.

Deferred Anticipation

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This apropos nothing...

I had an English teacher by the name of Fitch, DM Fitch if I recall. He was the absolute spitting image of Jonathan Swift, the author of Gulliver's Travels. I kid you not. It was bloody eerie. Although clearly he didn't wear the wig to work.

I'm sure he kept one at home so he could pay literary 'games'.

He was 'fussy', almost camp. A little owlish occasionally.

Like most of the masters at school, he was easily distracted. The feared and gargantuan figure of Thomas Edward Carrington ('TEC' to those who suffered alongside me) loomed over all, but if you caught even the monstrous TEC at the right moment, you could get him talking about The War so a double history lesson would pass peaceably and in relative enjoyment.

The War was always a winner. And so it proved one day with DM Fitch. And I'll never forget it.

DM, channelling his forebear JS, tended to pudgy. And so, he assured us, it was as a youth. But there Was A War On, and so the chocolate ration was limited. I can't remember to how much, a precious ounce or two per week.

His mother would return with the shopping and DM's craved square of mellifluous sweetness. It was then he would proceed to grate it into fine slivers of chocolate, curled like little brown toenails and collected into a piece of tinfoil. I am quite sure his memory failed him at this point in his anecdote, because any available tinfoil was being used to boil down into Spitfires, so it may well have been a piece of greaseproof he had embellished with the years.

He would then fold the gratings and place them carefully under the leg of his chair. And proceed to sit upon said chair to read a chapter, never less but always a full chapter, of the book he was devouring. He was obviously a bookworm as a child, evidently looking even then Swiftian and destined to become an English Master replete with tweed and leather elbows, a failed marriage to a gorgeous woman widely considered to be galaxies beyond him and now host to a Particularly Nasty Break-time Gin Habit.

Christ, if he's still alive I'm SO in court, aren't I?

Anyway. He would read his chapter and then - and only then - remove the compressed wodge of chocolate from beneath the chair leg where it had been squeezed, not unlike a diamond formed of carbon by volcanic forces, into a square of chocolate. And he would proceed to demolish it with Bunteresque greed.

"This, boys," he explained to us - utterly mystified - oiks, "is Deferred Anticipation".