Olives – A Violent Romance

This is the cover art for Olives - A Violent Romance, my first published novel. It's quite a high-res file so you can click on it and get it nice and big if you like. It’s by Naeema Zarif, a lady whose work has long enthralled me. Naeema is responsible for the iconography of GeekFest, her work on the various GeekFest posters increasingly taking on the style of her own art – a distinctive series of images consisting of a range of juxtaposed elements creating a whole that makes your eyes flit around trying to decipher what’s going on in the resulting melange. There’s often a great deal of wit, subtlety and game-playing, but Naeema is a natural tease and likes to leave the viewer to try and sort it all out rather than giving the game away.

My own cover for Olives, designed back when I needed one to post an early version of the manuscript up on Harper Collins’ Authonomy, consisted of a photo of some olives together with the word (wait for it) 'Olives' in my favourite typeface of all time, Gill Perpetua. I have long admired stonecutter and typographer Eric Gill, who combined being a darling of the Catholic church with a singularly robust sex life involving most of the women who ever met him.

Naeema’s art for Olives, when it arrived, blew me away. It’s utterly not what I expected, and yet seems so, well ‘right.’ It also, critically, works well as a thumbnail – today’s book cover needs to work as a booky book cover, a Kindle book cover (in colour as well as mono, BTW - don't forget the Kindle Fire!) and also as a thumbnail for Amazon.com and other sites.

It’s no surprise the cover of Olives consists of a number of elements. It’s a mash of images that come from Naeema’s reading of the book, there are elements resonant of multi-theism – Amman’s citadel is in there (look for a shape a little like ‘in’ at an angle across the cover), there is the earth the olives come from, the land and its importance are such an important part of Olives. The blues of the Mediterranean sky and the water are there, too. And so is parchment, a symbol of the unravelling peace the book is wound around. You’ll be hard put to find ‘em, but there are even some olives in there. Together, these things all speak to Olives – to the fundamentals that underpin the book. And behind the title, in faded characters, Mahmoud Darwish’s famous words – which form the frontispiece to Olives: “If the Olive Trees knew the hands that planted them, Their Oil would become Tears.”

It’s a remarkable piece of art and I’m very proud to have it grace and represent my work

Being able to select who designs my cover is, of course, a huge privilege open pretty much only to self published writers - publishing companies don't consult authors about their covers, that's a marketing decision and one not to be made by a mere scribbler (or 'content producer'). I suppose you get an option once you sell your first million copies or so, but I know a number of published authors who were told, 'This is your book's cover, matey', which was the beginning and end of the conversation. I'd always hoped if I landed a contract they'd let me at least pitch Naeema's hat into the ring, but I sort of knew that was a forlorn hope. But now I'm in control, I get to have my cake and eat it.

And it tastes just dandy...

(Literary) Agents of Doom

Image via WikipediaA writer friend of mine, a rather posh one, once cheered me up on the topic of literary agents. “Don’t worry, Alexander,” he said. “Literary agents are like eunuchs in the Ottoman court. They know it’s done, they see it done all around them, but they’re damned if they can do it for themselves.”

His words did, indeed, lift my spirits at the time. Agents had been rejecting me, something of a habit on their part.

Literary agents are the gatekeepers to editors. Editors are beings of pure energy who have the ability to take your manuscript to Marketing Meetings, if they so desire. But they will only look at your MS if is attached to a recommendation from an agent. There are exceptions to this, but they are relatively few and far between.

Literary agents in the UK receive something between 40-100 submissions a day from authors – it’s more in the US. Even the language used is a give-away – ‘submission’. We’re talking the full-on crawling on your stomach as a Cuban Heel is inserted insidiously between your buttocks and the lash descends.

A submission is a package of your first three chapters (50 pages) in Times New Roman (I have always wanted to be a literary agent just so I can request manuscripts in Comic Sans), twelve point, double-spaced with a 5mm paragraph indent. This would be accompanied by a compelling pitch letter and a synopsis of your whole work. Nothing less will do. When I started out in this game, that whole kit and caboodle had to be slide-bound, packaged up in the post with a self addressed envelope and an international reply paid coupon. Any deviation from this requirement results in getting your MS trashed without the option.

These days most agents, not all mind you, will accept an e-submission, which takes a huge burden off authors but makes it easier for them to spam agents. To be fair to agents, who often appear an appallingly stand-offish lot, authors will behave in extraordinary ways to get manuscripts across to them and will whine, spam and imprecate without any compassion for the target of their unwanted affections.

Fifty pages of book weighs quite a bit and costs about £10 to mail from Dubai to London. I reckon I have mailed about 180 such packages over the nine years I’ve been writing, editing, submitting, editing and submitting again. Never a week went by when I didn’t pop by Sharjah post office to find envelopes I’d printed out waiting for me. These frequently contained a photocopied rejection slip inside saying they were sorry but this wasn’t quite for them, apologising that the weight of submissions meant they couldn’t reply to me personally but wishing me the best of luck with my career in writing. Occasionally, a note would be scrawled in the margins with an observation, but this was pretty rare.

e-submission hurts less than physical submission, but only marginally.

As time went by, I got the occasional nibble. A nibble from an agent means a request for a ‘full read’. And then one fine day earlier this year, I landed me an agent. Robin set to right away, shopping my second novel, Beirut, at the London Book Fair. Twelve editors asked to see the MS. And, seven months later, twelve editors passed.

I’m glad to still have Robin on board, despite my decision to self-publish. But looking back on it, I do rather regret having spent so much time, effort and money on trying to sell my books to literary agents. With the changes in today’s publishing industry, the disruption of Amazon and e-books, the role of a literary agent to an author is no longer as critical as it was when I first started on this road. In fact, it’s never looked so dangerous – agents are starting to tread on publishers’ toes as they try to redefine their role in a world where authors are increasingly choosing to ‘go direct’ to readers. Publishers are also trying to see a clear path to the future.

Of course, there isn’t one. Unless you’re amazon.com...

The Book Slog Blog

Image by vial3tt3r via FlickrActually writing a book is easy as pie. You just take 75-100,000 words or so and put them down on paper. The order in which you place them can be a bit of a bugger, but the principle’s simple enough.

Most writers will knock up an average of around 1,000 words a day, so that’s a good three months to crack off a novel. Allow for procrastination, cunctation and a few other ations and you could easily (and advisedly) take 5-6 months to finish the first draft of a manuscript. You can work faster than that – I wrote the original MS of Olives in just over four weeks, but I’ve been seven years in editing it. Some people will write their book in four weeks and create a work of tear-jerking genius without having invested a second more. These are not, you understand, people to whom I talk.

Having finished the MS, in my case usually with the reward of a snappy Martini or two, you can breathe a sigh of relief before getting down to the real work. Because actually spending months writing a book is nothing. The real work starts when you’ve finished the damn thing.

First off is the editing. Dashing down 80,000 words of story is all great fun, but then you have to review it and make sure you’ve spelled everything right, avoided awful continuity errors, remained consistent to your characters, maintained your storyline and honed your writing so that the dialogue works, the action fizzles and the moments when two people go ‘ping’ actually go ‘ping’ and not ‘splot’. There have been whole books – a great deal of them, in fact – written on this subject. Writer’s forums constantly buzz to questions of POV (point of view), the passive and active voice (oh, puhlease!), characterisation, plot elements and all that sort of stuff. And we haven’t even started talking about sentence structure, ‘showing rather than telling’ and the myriad elements that stalk the furrowed brow of the harried writer editing his/her manuscript (or MS, if you want to use ‘the lingo’).

Now, don’t forget, you’ve just written tens of thousands of words – editing them all over again is a real trial. By the time you finish, you sort of hate those words. The bastards have no right to be so demanding, so imperfect. But finally you’re done. The MS looks good to go. (It rarely is at this point, but let’s not pee in the firework box too early, hey?)

Now you have to write a synopsis of your book. This is a one or (at most) two-page summation of what your book’s about, what actually happens in the thing. Any agent or editor wants to see a synopsis to find out if the thing makes sense as a whole. So your synopsis not only has to represent the key movements of the plot, it should ideally show your ability to write as well. This is a hellish thing to ask someone who has just written a book, then edited it to shining perfection, to do.

But it must be done.

What happens to your character? Who influences the development of the storyline and who is just there for colour? Chances are, by the way, if you can cut a character out of your synopsis, you can cut him/her out of the story and are better off doing so. The synopsis is a straight story-line, a compelling narrative from a to c that validates quite why b was ever involved. Take your story down to five pages, then halve the word count, take it down to a little over two pages. And then you can start playing hardball with those cowering little words. Eliminate, and do it like a Dalek with a really bad hangover.

It’s like swimming through molasses with 10lb weights tied to your bits. It’s an awful, sorry slog of a task.

And we’re not done with you yet, matey. Now we want a ‘blurb’.

A ‘blurb’ takes your synopsis and hones it down to under 400 words or thereabouts. Here’s the blurb for Olives:

[BlurbStart]

When Paul Stokes runs out of choices, his only path is betrayal. 

The fragile peace is holding. Behind the scenes, the Israelis are competing for dwindling water resources as Jordan and Palestine face drought. Daoud Dajani has the solution to Jordan’s water problems and is bidding against the British for the privatisation of Jordan’s water network. 

When journalist Paul Stokes befriends Dajani’s sister, Aisha, British intelligence agent Gerald Lynch realises Paul offers access to Dajani - the man threatening to drain Israel’s water supply and snatch the bid from the British. Blackmailed by Lynch into spying on Dajani, his movements seemingly linked to a series of bombings, Paul is pitched into a terrifying fight for survival that will force him to betray everyone around him. Even the woman he loves.

[EndBlurb]

That’s not the only blurb for Olives, but let’s not complicate things. Note it’s not a contiguous description of events in the book – it’s a summation of the action and points of action that are intended to evoke interest in what the work’s about. (You can judge whether it works in the comments, and please be my guest!)

Now you have a ‘blurb’ you can work it into your ‘pitch’. A blurb and pitch are two different things, although they are necessarily interrelated. The blurb is the text you’d slap on the back of a book. A pitch is what you’d say to a top London literary agent if you got one minute of his/her attention. The best way to do this is crash their lunch at the Athenaeum holding a Scalectrix controller wired to a lumpy belt around your waist and screaming ‘I’ll take you bastards all with me’ before you start pitching. This might seem extreme, but don’t worry. Agents are used to authors doing this. The worrying trend emerging is agents are now doing this to editors as the world of conventional publishing slowly collapses into itself like Michael Moorcock's Biloxi Fault.

Not even the Athenaeum, it must be said, is a safe haven these days...

Anyway, now you have a book, a synopsis, a blurb and a pitch. You've also likely got RSI and a rocky relationship. Next comes the hard bit. I'll come on to that tomorrow...

Olives - The Book

I might as well apologise now. I'm going to be posting about books and writing all through the Sharjah International Book Fair.

My thoughts are pretty much focused in that direction, so I'll be sharing my path to publishing my own work, what it takes to self-publish from the UAE and Olives, the book I'm finally unleashing on an unsuspecting and unprepared general public during the Fair.

Writing posts usually destroy traffic to the blog. But what the hell. It's my book and I'm proud of it...

Taking The Self Publishing Plunge

It's been a long road. I first set out to write a full-length novel in 2002 odd, the result being the highly amusing but - in my opinion - unpublishable novel Space. This was to be the start of a very nasty writing habit indeed - I had decided, for reasons I have mostly forgotten, that I wanted in print and that was to that. I'd keep slamming into the brick wall until I got what I wanted.

It doesn't quite work like that, of course.

Space was undoubtedly funny, but agents kept saying things like 'We don't get humour' and 'Humour is a hard sell', whilst universally acknowledging they found it highly amusing. Which is, you have to admit, funny. So I set out to write a serious book and that became Olives, my first 'real' book. Olives is about being a foreigner, a tourist who becomes embroiled in the events we all see on the TV when we're sitting down comfortably. It's about love and betrayal and it's set in Jordan, a Jordan where the good guys and bad guys are really hard to tell apart and where the next lie is just around the corner.

Olives is a book very close to my heart indeed. I followed it by writing Beirut, a testosterone-soaked spy thriller with thousands of sizzling gypsies, which landed me an agent (after something like 250 rejections) and a chance to get my work slid under 24 of London's most editorially respected eyeballs at the London Book Fair this year. They all came back with variations on 'no' - a process that took an incredible, destructive seven months to wrap up. No the British reader doesn't understand the Middle East, no we don't feel this will sell in supermarkets, no it'll take investment to break, no it's not quite for us, no we don't do war zones (Jad, get that certificate ready!) and so on.

All of this has been happening as the world of publishing is being not only transformed, but torn apart by the Internet. The Kindle alone has driven a stake right into the heart of 'traditional' publishing and I have long resisted the blandishments of friends like revolutionary barricade-manning author Dan Holloway even as I watched authors turning to new formats to find their audiences as traditional publishing invested minimally in supermarket-friendly romcom slapped out in trays of 3 for 2 deals. I held out. I wanted the validation and scale traditional publishing could give me.

Except as I have travelled further down this road, I have come to realise not only do I not need either of those from traditional publishing - they're not on offer in any case. On the validation front, getting an agent to sign me up was validation enough - but it goes further than that. Today, self publishing isn't vanity publishing, it's not the exclusive preserve of unreadable memoirs and books by nutters (although, let us be clear, there are plenty of those out there). It's not only part of the mainstream, it's driving millions of sales. There has never been so much choice for consumers, so much so it's actually a challenge to work out what's good, bad or ugly out there. Validation comes not from being picked by the gatekeeper (let us not forget, over 98% of books in print sell less than 500 copies) but from selling books to people who like them. If I'm truthful with myself, I don't need a publisher to do that any more. I can do it, as Celine Dion tells us (repeatedly and to my invariable irritation) all by myself.

As for scale, I now know enough published authors who have found they are forced to market themselves because their publishers are putting them on the backburner, who have trudged weary miles to earn back their paltry advances and who are bitter, dejected and generally pissed off with the whole demeaning and disempowering experience that publishing in the Age of Fear has become. I know authors who have been completely disassociated from their work, who have given up any ownership of the look and feel of their hard graft only to find the result, crass and unimaginative, has been shunned by the book sales team because there's something sexier in that month's basket. And the book sales team is what puts you on shelves, not editors.

And, actually, when it comes down to it, I want my cover to be designed by Naeema Zarif. I don't want to give that up. And I want that 'difficult' scene left in. And I want to let my work speak for people, not pander to their vanities.

So Olives is finally (seven years after it was first written) going to be a tale that gets told, not a manuscript locked in a dusty filing cabinet. Whoever buys it, however many people read it, it'll at least get the public airing traditional publishing denied it. And if just two people read it, that's two more than would have read it otherwise.

I'll be documenting the road to self publishing as we limber up to the launch of the book, just because it's been quite fun to self publish in the UAE. Olives, a violent romance, launches at the Sharjah International Book Fair on the 20th November 2011 with an evening event at the Fair. More on that later. For now, I'm busy working to try and get multiple editions ready for multiple platforms, including a 'booky book' print edition for the Middle East which has been made necessary by the fact Amazon et al won't sell us content online. That alone has been a story worth dining out on, I can tell you.

Oddly, this has all meant that I have once again become a publisher, having joyfully escaped the world of publishing some fifteen years ago...

Gulf News - See No Evil

Image via WikipediaGulf News ran an Associated Press story on the front page of its business section today on the report issued by Transparency International on bribery. That report's findings are linked here.

GN tagged the piece, a highly edited version of the AP file (the AP piece is linked here for your listening pleasure), 'The Power of Money'. The piece is not available on the GN website, but does point out that China and Russia are the countries most prone to bribery in TI's report.

What it fails to point out is that the UAE ranks fifth most likely to bribe in the report, which surveyed 3,000 businessmen on how often firms from the various countries they deal with resort to bribery. The report lists 28 countries - the UAE ranking fifth worst (joint fifth, to be fair - we rank alongside Argentina, which is in itself something of an indictment) and Saudi Arabia seventh worst. The rest of the Middle East isn't included in the report, which is probably just as well.

TI's report found that 'no country was found to be wholly clean' and also that the construction sector was most likely to bribe its way into business, with the real estate sector coming in joint second worst. Which may go some of the way to explaining the UAE's ranking. This is, by the way, the first time the UAE has been included in the index.

The question is, did GN just paste up an AP file to fill some space without bothering to check if the UAE featured on the index or did it know and let the fact pass it by? If the former, we're looking at awful, sloppy no news-sense journalism - a half-boiled intern with learning problems would have Googled the index to see if the UAE featured (as I did, being a half-boiled intern). If the latter, GN could arguably justify the omission by claiming it's an AP file and as AP didn't highlight the UAE's position, GN didn't see fit to overrule such a respected international news source. Which is hardly tenable, but is probably preferable to admitting you're a bunch of craven, drooling morons who could no more serve the public interest than play Für Elise on a chocolate banjo.

The National ran the piece front page business, too:"UAE companies debut with 5th place in bribery global survey" as opposed to GN's "China, Russia most prone to bribery."

Spot the difference...

Editing Book Manuscripts With A Kindle

Image by Eye - the world through my I via FlickrAmazon's Kindle e-reader is the most amazing editing tool for writers you can imagine. It's totally, brilliantly, portable and the keyboard Kindle lets you annotate text, inserting comments simply and quickly and then allowing you run through those notes afterwards, jumping back to the point in the text where your note resides - effectively 'playing back' your edits as you transfer them back to the master copy of your MS.

It's all the more effective as an editing tool as it has effectively the same 'form factor' as a published work - you're reading the text as your readers will see it, not as a double spaced MS on screen or print and as a consequence I find myself picking up many more pieces of clunky writing or gawky style than I have before - even on a manuscript that has been extensively - and professionally - edited.

How do you make your MS into a Kindle book without uploading it to Amazon? Simple as pie!

First go here and download this natty piece of software. It's called Mobipocket Creator and it's a simple and powerful little utility that packs together the files you need to create a Kindle book - including cover files and the like, by the way.

Now you need to export your MS - I'll assume you're using Microsoft Word as an editor. Take the 'Save As' option and find 'Web Page, Filtered'. Give it a nice, distinctive file name and save it somewhere sensible, for instance a folder called Kindle Book.

The 'filtered' option cuts down on (but doesn't totally obviate, tragically) Microsoft's bloated HTML. Mobipocket Creator will import a Word file, but the HTML import option cuts out on more SNAFUs and the like. Once you've imported your HTML file, take the 'Build' option from the menu at the top. When you've completed the build you'll be presented with a screen giving you an option to 'Open folder containing e-book'. Take this and plug in your Kindle.

You'll see the Kindle appearing under 'My Computer' as an accessory, much as you'd see a memory key which, in fact, is all the Kindle is as far as Windows is concerned. Expand the Kindle's folders and you'll see one called 'Documents'. Take the e-book file Mobipocket creator has made and drag and drop it onto this folder and hey presto! your MS has been transformed in a couple of seconds into a Kindle book ready for you to take on the train to work and edit at your leisure.

Amazingly, the above steps represent pretty much 90% of what you'd need to do to create a professional e-book file to upload to Amazon. I'll post about that process a little later.

(This is one of a large number of writing and book posts that will undoubtedly decimate traffic to this blog over the weeks leading up to the Sharjah International Book Fair.)

Tim Horton's Coffee. Yum. Not.

Image via WikipediaCanadian coffee chain Tim Horton's has opened up in Dubai to much applause. It was thus that I found a colleague tucking into a cup of 'Tim Horton’s French Vanilla Cappuccino'. It is, according to the tin, "Rich and delicious". It smelt vile - sickly and unreal. Curious, I flipped the tin to read the ingredients label and this is what I found:

Sugar, coffee whitener [corn syrup solids, partially hydrogenated coconut oil, sodium caseinate (a milk derivative), dipotassium phosphate (E340i stabiliser), sodium tripolyphosphate (E451i), mono and diglycerides (vegetable), diacetyl tartaric esters of mono and diglycerides (E472e), sodium silicoaluminate (E554), artificial flavour], nonfat dry milk, instant coffee, artificial vanilla flavour [dextrose, maltodextrin, artificial flavour, tricalcium phosphate (E341iii)], artificial vanilla flavour [maltodextrin, artificial flavour, silicon dioxide (E551)], silicon dioxide (E551 anticaking agent), cocoa (processed with alkali), salt, carboxymethyl cellulose gum (E468 stabiliser).

The headlines are as follows. One cup of this product contains ONE FIFTH of your recommended daily intake of saturated fats, something like four teaspoons of sugar - the ENTIRE recommended daily intake of added sugar for a woman according to the American Heart Association and contains not one vanilla seed. It's also got no French in it. It does pack a neat punch of trans-fats, corn syrup and artifical flavourings and preservatives.

Let's take a look at that rich and delicious mixture in a little more detail... The ingredients in caps are the main ingredients, the ones just bolded are sub-ingredients of the main ingredient above.

SUGAR
The largest ingredient by weight in this product is not coffee, it's sugar. A lot of sugar. In fact, over half the content of that tin is sugar - 20g for each 35g serving. The tin's nutrition label cleverly dumps the sugar content together with fibre (0%, how could you expect to find fibre in something this processed?) under 'carbohydrates' which means it's only 8% of your recommended daily intake. Quite apart from the fact that almost a tenth of your recommended carbohydtate intake is provided by one cup of hot drink, this prestidigitation with labelling avoids telling you that this drink contains 100% of a woman's recommended daily intake of added sugar and 50% of a man's recommended intake (the recommendation comes from the American Heart Association). Not bad for one cup of gloop, is it?

COFFEE WHITENER
This contains: corn syrup solids, partially hydrogenated coconut oil, sodium caseinate (a milk derivative), dipotassium phosphate (E340i stabiliser), sodium tripolyphosphate (E451i), mono and diglycerides (vegetable), diacetyl tartaric esters of mono and diglycerides (E472e), sodium silicoaluminate (E554), artificial flavour

Deelicious! A brief examination of those yummy looking ingredients!

Corn Syrup Solids
So the largest ingredient in the whitener is, you guessed it, more sugar. Corn syrup solids are made by removing the water from corn syrup. As you'll know from previous posts, the majority of corn in the US is genetically modified and corn syrup (high fructose or otherwise) is ubiquitous in American processed foods.

Partially Hydrogenated Coconut Oil
Also known as a trans fat. Oddly, the tin's label proclaims 0% trans fats, but they're definitely in there - coconut oil is a saturated fat to start with, but when treated with hydrogen bubbles to thicken it, ('hydrogenation') it becomes a trans-fat, a man-made fat that suppresses your body's use of 'good cholestrol' and adds to its stock of 'bad' cholestrol.

Sodium Caseinate (a milk derivative)
This is an odd ingredient, as it is permitted by the US FDA to be an ingredient in 'non dairy' creamers, and yet is, as it says on the tin, a 'milk derivative'. Casein is a protein found in milk and this ingredient, which is a thickener and adds a 'dairy taste' to products, is obtained from fresh and/or pasteurized skimmed milk by acid coagulation of the casein. The mix is then neutralised using sodium hydroxide and powdered.

Dipotassium Phosphate and Sodium Tripolyphosphate
The first is a stabiliser, the second a preservative and moisture retainer.

Mono and diglycerides (vegetable),  (E472e), diacetyl tartaric esters of mono and diglycerides (E472e)
Mono and diglycerides are fats, used to extend shelf life, add a creamy flavour and help to bind other ingredients together. There's a lot of debate about them as they have appeared on food labels in place of hydrogenated oils, although they're a sort of new name for an old friend as they are, themselves, hydrogenated in the production process. The latter ingredient is sometimes referred to by the more friendly acronym DATEM.

Sodium Silicoaluminate and artifical flavour
The first is an anti-caking agent, the second is artificial.

NONFAT DAIRY MILK
Funny in a highly processed product packed with fats that they'd choose to use 'nonfat' powdered milk. Just out of interest, powdered milk contains higher levels of oxysterols, cholestrol derivatives that have been associated with the depositing of fatty materials on artery walls.

INSTANT COFFEE
What it says on the tin.

ARTIFICIAL VANILLA FLAVOUR
There are actually TWO artificial vanilla flavours in this product. Both contain processed sugars (dextrose and maltodextrin), tricalcium phosphate (also charmingly known as 'bone ash') or silicon dioxide, which are both anti-caking agents. And both contain 'artificial flavour'. This is a product that has never seen a vanilla pod and probably wouldn't recognise it if it did.

COCOA
Don't worry about the (processed with alkali), it's a process used in many cocoa drinks and just balances the natural acidity of the cocoa.

SALT
Quite a lot of it - 6% of your recommended daily intake (10% if you're over 51 or black).


CARBOXYMETHYL CELLULOSE GUM
A thickener.

So there we have it, a delicious drink in which no single ingredient has not undergone processing, which packs together artificial flavours with various ingredients designed to artificially trick you into thinking you're drinking something lovely when in fact what you're drinking is a cocktail of dubious fats, artificial flavouring agents and thickeners - and so much sugar you're likely drinking a whole day's recommended intake in one cup.

Enjoy!

Phished or Hacked?

Image via WikipediaIt's yet another very odd story coming out of Dubai Courts and I'm not sure whether that's because Dubai Courts are an odd place or because the journalism itself is odd. Gulf News reports today on a woman whose account was "hacked by a phishing syndicate". The story's here.

It's a very confusing story indeed - her account is variously described as having been hacked into and she as having been victimised by a phishing syndicate. Well, being hacked is one thing, being phished is quite another - and the core of the story, surely, is whether one or the other situation applies. If she was phished, she willingly gave away her account details which then would have been used by a criminal to access her account - no hacking involved. If she was hacked, someone illegally accessed her account by manipulating the bank's security systems.

And where did a 'syndicate' come from?

The story also makes mention of a mobile notification service which didn't kick in until four days after the transactions, but not why the service didn't kick in. Are we saying that all banks now have to notify all clients of all transactions or face liability for any fraud howsoever caused?

The court brought in an expert, a banker. I wonder why it didn't bring an expert on security in to clear things up a little? The whole report left me with a great deal more questions than answers - and that's not what journalism is supposed to do, is it? It's supposed to give us 'context and analysis'...

Ministry

Image via WikipediaBack in the distant mists of time, I published magazines as a day job. It's what originally brought me out to the UAE in 1993 - I set up a publishing operation based out of pals' offices (and under their trade license) in Ajman.

I produced a computer magazine which was something of a pioneer - it was a reviews magazine, something the region didn't have at the time. We brought PCs, software and other IT equipment in from international and local companies alike and speed tested them, prodded them and otherwise evaluated them for the elucidation of a grateful readership.

We used desktop publishing to produce the magazine. This meant that I brought a PC with me out from the UK and was able to write, do all the make-up and prepress work then just spin the whole lot out to camera-ready pages of 'bromide' at a bureau. Even 'bleeding edge' DTP users (and I was one: I can tell you I spilt a great deal of blood)  hadn't got the hang of colour scanning back then, so the printers still had to scan the images into the ready-made areas defined on the pages.

This meant that I had, quite literally, a publishing house on my desktop. This was to cause a great deal of consternation when the Ministry of Information shut us down.

We arrived at the office one morning to find it sealed with official tape. We'd been closed down by the Ministry! We high-tailed it down to the Ajman MoI offices (which at the time were near where the Kempinski is now) only to find it wasn't on their account - it was a request from Dubai. So off to Qusais to the Ministry of Information building there to try and find out what it was we'd done to deserve getting closed down.

We'd reviewed a computer. Not any old computer, a really bad local OEM job. It was an unserviceable unit when it arrived with us and we had (with charming naiveté) said so in the magazine. Trouble was, the bloke that owned the computer company had a relative who was a Big Bug at the (you guessed it) Ministry of Information. We were in very, very big trouble indeed.

I remember the meeting I had with the first of a succession of Men With Very Big Desks, my nose pressed against the edge of a glass-topped expanse the size of an aircraft carrier as I was served gallons of zaatar and fruit teas in custard glasses. He wanted to know where was the editor and I told him it was me. And where was the publisher? It was me. Where did we publish? From the office. But what about staff? Erm. Me. And my ad sales guy. What about graphic artists and journalists and editors and men to do layouting and typesetters? Me. He was fascinated. Publishing without a publishing house was something he just couldn't get his head around.

I realised, with growing glee, that the bookshelves lining his office were stacked with Forbidden Fruit. Jackie Collins featured in the collection in a big way, Erica Jong and Molly Parkin tucked up alongside her.

We worked from home as the problem was thrashed out, our sponsor being relatively floppy about the whole thing until someone from the other side insulted him personally. He suddenly turned into a whirlwind of epic proportions, a Tasmanian Devil on crack with a revenge fixation that made Charles Bronson look like the tooth fairy. The whole thing was sorted in seconds flat after that.

I found myself in Qusais again yesterday and today, entering the same building as I had all those years ago to have sentence pronounced on me and my publishing company on a desktop. This time around it's a great deal more pleasant in there, lighter and more airy, the people smiling and helpful. It's called the National Media Council now.

The lady I talked to yesterday looked with mild horror at the memory stick I held up when she asked for my book. Mildly incredulous and laughing embarrassedly, she pointed out that they needed two sets of printouts on paper.

A book on a memory stick! I mean, whatever next? A publishing company on a desktop?

I delivered tottering stacks of manuscript this morning, a step necessary for those seeking 'permission to print' a book in the UAE. Let's see what happens now.