Absence (Editing Revisited)

If the adage 'absence makes the heart grow fonder' pans out, you should all be pretty fond of me. Sorry, I've had my head buried in a book.

It's funny, when you write one of the damn things, you think you've pretty much got it down pat. When you're 'in the zone' and the prose is flying off your fingertips like flying things, you just know that your elegantly turned phrase is just right, the description of the location breathtaking and your characterisation is so on the money, you could almost cash it.

You finish it and stick it in a drawer for a while, a pause for you to bring your head back down to earth and perhaps even spend some quality time synthesising vitamin D. And then you drag your weary carcase back to the huge pile of words (about 100,000 in the case of Beirut - An Explosive Thriller) and start to sift through them.

This is when you discover your prose is lumpen, your dialogue wooden, your MS is littered with unforgiveable continuity errors and - worst of all - its packed with grammatical errors, repetitive phrases and hordes of adverbs running amok all over the place.

The adverbs have to go. Most of them, at least. Sometimes they look up at you with big brown pleading eyes, like baby seals. But go they must. If it helps, close your eyes as you swing the club.

Editing is never a single pass process, you have to go over it all several times - as much to make sure the story works and every scene is necessary as to spot grammatical errors and typos, what we used to call in publishing, 'literals'. Now you can pack it off to your editor.

If you're self publishing, you MUST hire a professional editor. Budget $1,000-$1,500 for one. And get ready to suck it up because editor's aren't kind. You're not paying them to be. You're paying them to be brutal, callous and hard hearted. Those last few adverbs are likely to find a remorseless enemy in your editor - as are those scenes that do nothing for the story but you couldn't let go because you loved them so much. Your editor will clean the MS up - point out your stylistic weaknesses, tell you to cut dialogue or characters and generally behave like a crack-pumped Attilla in the china shop of your lovingly created prose.

They're worth their weight in gold. Mine is Southern Gentleman Robb Grindstaff and I do heartily recommend him.

So there we have it. The book is edited. Now it is time to focus on the other things we must do in order to make a book happen. So I might be gone a while longer. And then, yes my loves, you can prepare for the inevitable promotional blitzkrieg.

Jordan Rubberstamps Web Curbs

"Censored" rubber stamp (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Gulf News and The National both make much of the Indian cartoonist arrested for criticising the government, but both fail to note that Jordan's lower house yesterday passed the amendments to the press and publications law which were behind the recent online 'blackout' protest in the country. The amendments bring websites under the regulatory framework established for newspapers and their passing saw protests outside parliament, with journalists and the Jordanian Press Association opposing the move.

The law brings website blocking powers to the government's Department of Press and Publications (so much nicer sounding than 'Ministry of Information' but functionally the same). Websites must now register and apply for a license - those that don't are liable to be blocked. Those that do will be governed by the press law.

Jordan has always had a free Internet, with no website blocking, commonplace elsewhere in the region ostensibly for religious and cultural reasons, but often extending to political and commercial blocks. It has been notable that the fabric of Jordanian society has not collapsed as a result. However the country has almost a thousand news websites as well as hosting websites such as the highly popular Kharabeesh.com, which often carry topical, critical and pointed satirical content. And there is much to satirise, as any Jordanian will happily point out at length.


The vote was carried by 69 attending parliamentarians in the 120 seat assembly, with a significant number walking out in protest. One of its more endearing articles makes websites liable for comments, effectively forcing every website, blog and even potentially Facbook pages, to moderate comments. That liability extends, and yes I am being serious, to prohibiting 'off topic' comments.

One ironic side-effect of the new law is that is has possibly rendered next year's edition of the Rough Guide to Jordan out of date. Svelte and dashing young journalist and travel writer Matthew Teller tweeted yesterday, "In the new edition of Rough Guide to Jordan, I wrote "The internet is not censored". The book isn't out till January. Don't prove me wrong."

Looks like he's going to have to pull the plates on that section...

Let The Chaos Begin!

Hornjoserbsce: A sim card (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Gulf News today carries a Great Pronouncement Of Doom from UAE telecom provider Etisalat. If you don't register your SIM card on time, you're going to have your line cancelled, they tell us. It's all part of the UAE's Telecom Regulatory Authority slightly obtuse campaign,  'My number, my identity'.

As I predicted earlier, this one has all the usual Ealing Comedy attributes. We are all to trot off to a telephone company office with a passport copy (and original it seems) or a national ID card (copy and original we assume) and re-register our mobile lines by filling a form. The 'campaign' started on the 17th June - now Etisalat has given 1.5 million of its 8.6mn subscribers just three months to register their lines, failing which they will suspend the line. Three months after that, it's cancellation. They've sent out texts to the lucky 1.5 million hapless victims telling them to register or lose all within 90 days.

As I pointed out before, it took five years to issue everyone National ID Cards here - and that's still not a 'done deal'. The constant slew of frequently clashing announcements, pronouncements, threats and exhortations have provided endless amusement. Now we're going there all over again.

Does Etisalat really think they can get 1.5 million lines re-registered in 90 days? Even allowing for a constant and equal throughput across all their 104 offices, that means 160 applicants re-registered per office per day, or (with an eight hour day) 20 per hour. Or a constant rate of one registration every three minutes in each and every office.

Don't make me laugh. Etisalat doesn't process bill payments that fast, let alone re-registering lines (including, presumably, verifying and inputting the registration information as well as scanning documents etc). Can you imagine the long, hopeless, shuffling queues? I can and I'm in no hurry to play, thank you.

In fact, Etisalat's spokesperson told GN "It won't take more than ten minutes to fill the form... everyday we have an average of 10,000 subscribers who approach Etisalat offices to update their personal information.". At that, frankly unbelievable, number, we're still talking only 900,000 registrations in 90 days.

And then they're proposing to text another 1.5 million customers, just to add to the chaos from the preceding 90 days.

Words fail me.

Break Out The Freebies!

Once again, ladies and gentlemen, you have the chance to acquire a lovely fresh copy of my first, funny, novel for free. That's right, not one penny will it cost you from around 12 noon Gulf Standard Time right through to the same time tomorrow - 24 hours of untrammeled freebiness with a dollop of free ebook on the side.

All you have to have is a Kindle or the Kindle reader for PC, iPad or any other device.

You just click on this here easy to use YES! I WANT A FREE COPY OF SPACE link to Amazon.co.uk. Or if you're in the US or India you can CLICK HERE for amazon.com!

And that's all there is to it!

Why should you want a free copy of Space? Well, for a start it's free. Secondly it's funny (if at times a little risqué, not a read for the faint hearted or easily shocked, you have been warned) and comes with a laughter guaranteed or your money back promise. As I have explained before:

Space spoofs a genre that I have come to call the ‘airport novel’; that comfortingly large slab of silliness that you invariably turn to when you have to survive a seven-hour flight. Just like the Avian Obsession and the Maltese Balcony and those other man-in-race-against-time-against-unfeasible-odds-to-save-the-world-against-shadowy-cabal-led-by-megalomaniac books, Space is a fast moving page-turner filled with baddies and secret agent babes. Unlike the majority of them, Space is also intentionally and successfully funny.

Main character Dr. Ben Jonson is transformed from being a happy middle-class GP into a wilful killer, chased across Europe by police and various intelligence agencies. His odysseyette (it is so a word. I looked it up on the Internet) brings him together with a psychopathic CIA agent in a catsuit, a sex worker from Weybridge and a devastatingly effective computer virus that causes widespread societal breakdown. It all ends up with American bombers, the police and army, the Russian Mafia and a number of highly eccentric octogenarians coming together under a stone circle somewhere in Southern England.

In Space, the baddy spends most of his time with his hand up his pneumatic secretary’s skirt, the good guys are kooks and MI5 safe houses are staffed by pink-haired camp people. The book darkens a little when the action starts moving, but it never stops being irredeemably daft. By the time we’re ready to resolve things at the end, there’s lots of slightly strange sex going on. I always find that strange sex is so much more interesting than ordinary ‘boy meets girl and gets it on’ which, lets face it, has been done before.

 The offer comes to you courtesy of Amazon's Kindle Select programme,  which means I can only sell Space over Amazon for three months, but can give it away for five days within that period. This is the second giveaway day of my five. It's a bit like having three wishes, except there are five of them and they're not wishes. And if you're a Kindle Prime subscriber in the US, Space is permafree!

Do share the news far and wide. The more people who download Space free, the happier I'll be! If anyone fancies leaving a review on Amazon, that'd be just lovely but there is no obligation so to do whatsoever.

Content warning - Space is published in the US and UK only and does have a number of rude bits in it. So if you're easily offended, please don't read it!

From Dubai to Moscow

 (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

Could this be the story of the making of the worst film of the year? Those long in the tooth may remember I posted in 2007 and again in 2009 about a film script called 'Dubai', written by 'tyro' writer Adam Cozad and duly sold to Paramount.

A copy of the script was posted online but has now, tragically, been taken down. As I pointed out back in 2009, when it became clear that the GFC meant 'Dubai' was DOA, it was a slab of utter crap layered with some more crap and sprinkled with crappy hundreds and thousands. Written by a man who had not only never been to Dubai but wouldn't know Dubai from a pickled wombat if it hit him in the back of the neck, it trotted out every tired, vapid cliche in the book and complemented these with some woeful silliness, racism and a nice dose of unbelievable stupidity.

You might think I'm going overboard here. Trust me, I'm being kind. As I said back in 2009:

We are introduced to our hero in a shot where he is playing his regular game of tennis with his gorgeous wife. The camera pulls back to reveal that the game is taking place on the helipad of the Burj Al Arab. The whole thing goes downhill from that low point with such pace that it's like being on a theme park 'drop' ride.

 It now appears that 'Dubai' spent a couple of years in a cupboard somewhere at Paramount before someone realised they'd wasted real money buying the unlovely turd-like thing and decided to use it as the script to relaunch the Jack Ryan franchise. And so 'Dubai' became 'Moscow', with a number of writers, including ('briefly' according to Slash Film) Cozad hired to rework the script into, presumably, something at least viewable by mentally retarded macaques - a major task if the script that was 'Dubai' was to be polished to gleam like true Hollywood gold.

It remains to be seen if the film will open on the helipad of the Burj Al Arab or perhaps a game of tennis in Red Square. Will there be a snowy dacha and a sexy vodka love scene on a bearskin rug in front of a open fire? A skating scene with perhaps someone dying under the ice? There's bound to be at least one sauna/steam bath scene. And, of course, lots of gangsters and oligarchs. Will the idiotically helpful Sikh crane driver make it through?

It almost makes the whole thing worth watching. Not.

(Thanks to an eagle-eyed pal Talal who spotted the 'Moscow' news and my old post and put two and two together)

Fake Book Reviews. A Confession.

books (Photo credit: brody4)

I have to confess to being unsurprised at the 'established authors create fake reviews' furore. Authors are not gentlemen.

The latest head to fall, apparently, is crime writer RJ Ellory. The whole thing was started by novelist Stephen Leather, talking on a panel at the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival. He crowed, idiotically, about the way he creates 'sock puppets' - alternative Internet personae - to big up his books, including creating false reviews and *gasp* tweeting false praise as well as dissing 'rivals'.

What annoys me is the line sniffily taken by mainstream media commentators such as The Independent's Terence Blacker, "You'd expect this from self published writers, but surely not established authors".

Would you now?

As traditional publishing has struggled, and largely failed, to come to terms with the challenges of the Internet Age, publishers have wasted no time in pushing their authors to blog and tweet in promotion of their work. That many authors aren't very astute users of the Internet should come as no surprise - the poor darlings mostly like to sit in sheds and write fantasies, not leap about Twitter dressed in a silver lame thong and squealing 'My book, read my book!'.

I have myself spent much of the preceding decade dealing with the infuriatingly analogue types known as literary agents (only latterly would they accept submissions online and there are still die-hards who won't look at email). A chummy, clubby and massivly analogue industry mired in a business model predicated on massive inefficiency, publishing has struggled to redefine itself, and largely failed. As more focus is drawn to the industry, we start to see more of the underhand, self-serving behaviours of 'big publishing', including authors writing blurbs for unknowns to please powerful editors and agents. A practise little better than sock puppetry, IMHO.

As it happens, not one of my reviews for Olives - A Violent Romance, is me in disguise or any friend or family member I have pressed to write positively. Many reviewers have encountered me online or at a conference of some sort, part of the reason people buy books. Many have been sent my book for review, the clear deal here is you get an independent review of your work. I am very proud of the very many positive reviews Olives has garnered and can see no reason why I should jeopardise that by cheating.

Besides, I'm not even totally sure about the value of reviews. I can trace no discernable impact on e-book sales resulting from any one review of Olives, although I do think there is huge value in a collection of positive - thoughtful - reviews of a book being available to readers. The trouble is now, they can't be entirely sure whether those reviews are the 'real deal'. This is where reputation - as so often it does online - comes in as an important factor. And that reputation has to be earned - it can't be faked for long.

Aleppo State Of Mind

Gerald Lynch blinked at the transition from the late afternoon sunlight to the cool darkness of Aleppo’s covered souk. Wearing jeans and a plain white t-shirt with scuffed sneakers and with a slim bag slung around his neck and over his shoulder, Lynch felt like a tourist. 
The souk was noisy, a bustling tide of people packing the narrow street, a motor scooter welded to a trailer forging its way through the press. The stalls were brightly lit from inside, neon strips hanging crazily from twisted wire stays and broken fittings, sacks of flour, wheat, spices and charcoal lined the way, poor stores selling charcoal, tobacco, spices and sweets butted up against collections of pans and kitchen implements. Lynch slipped through the throng feeling lost as he tried to recall his way around the Ottoman labyrinth. He hadn’t been back to Aleppo in ten years and more and hadn’t seen The General since the end of the Lebanese Civil War. He felt old as the scents of the souk took him back: oudh incense burning, baking, spices, exhaust fumes. He passed a man butchering a lamb hanging from its back legs on a great hook, its viscera shining as the knife sliced into it. 
He turned left from the busy street, passing shops stacked high with bolts of cloth, tailors working on ancient-looking sewing machines that whirred away over their voices raised in cheerful conversation. There it was, just as it had been all those years ago, the little shop front hung with sequinned belly-dancer costumes and kandouras decorated with dangles of little brass coins. 
Lynch stepped into the shop, pushing aside the plastic strips hanging in the doorway. The sound inside was muffled by the clothing hanging on the walls, towards the rear there were shelves of gold-decorated bottles, packets of solid bukhour perfumes and mubkhars, the little jars used to burn incense. Sitting behind a tin desk with a glass top was a thin man. His bulbous, mouse’s eyes flitted constantly around the room, settling on Lynch then darting away in an instant.
From Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy

It's strange to see Aleppo in the news. It's even odder to see it under bombardment, fighting in its streets and in the long, cool alleys of the world's greatest covered souk. The picture that has always sat as the masthead of a certain silly little blog was taken during one of my long wanders around in that very souk, a place where you could still feel the heartbeat of an older, more basic Middle East. At its heart are Ottoman mosques and madrasas, a dark, rich 14th century Armenian orthodox church.

Over the years living in the Middle East, I suppose you get used to seeing places you know and love, places where friends live, embroiled in conflict. F16s glittering above Beirut's corniche, tanks rolling through Kuwait's boulevards, police firing on demonstrators in Cairo and bombs smashing through hotels in Amman all seem so remote on a TV screen and yet have a horrible resonance when you're involved with the places and the people living there. You can just hope they're okay, that the violence passed them by. That they got out before it got too bad. That the water and electricity stay on. You send messages and don't get replies or perhaps reassurances that, yes they're okay and it's not as bad as it seems on TV.

It's never as bad as it seems on TV. I vividly recall meeting some Americans exhibiting at the Dubai World Trade Centre just after the Gulf War (the Kuwait one, not the Iran/Iraq one) who had come out to help rebuild the Gulf. They'd seen it on CNN, in flames. All of it. And they were gonna help rebuild it all. I did wonder how long it would take before the penny dropped. I was chatting to friends in Aleppo a few days ago and being told it was 'no biggie'. Now they're in Amman.

UNESCO is worried about the damage, apparently. I see what they mean - Syria is home to so much that is key to our history, from the crusader castles through to the ikons in that church. But I'd go worrying about the people first - the people in that photo, buying spices in the souk - and over two million more like them.

The Quietest Office

Image via CrunchBase

Apple has an office in the UAE. Operating out of Abu Dhabi media zone TwoFour54, it would appear to be something of a 'best kept secret'.

Where was the fanfare? The dancing girls? The roar of the greasepaint and the smell of the crowds? Companies typically waste no time at all in trumpeting office openings - look at the fuss Facebook and LinkedIn are making.

Tech website itp.net ran a couple of speculative stories on Apple opening a UAE office back in 2010 - one based on channel rumours of an office opening 'this year' and one quoting distributor Arab Business Machines (ABM) on how the opening wouldn't materially affect their business. And that's it. Nothing else. no announcements, no interviews. No Tim Cooks talking about commitment to the Middle East. Silence.

The only reason it came to light at all is that I mentioned on the weekly Unwired radio show yesterday that Apple had famously never opened a point of presence in the Middle East. In all these years, Apple has provided highly capable Arabic language support (it was very early to market with Mac Arabic language support for the burgeoning desktop publishing market, which it dominated in the Middle East) but never actually been here as such. A listener texted in 'not so' and so I asked Twitter.

The result was surprising. Not only did people come out of the woodwork with affirmatives, but one former journalist at The National even pinpointed the office building at TwoFour54 and mentioned that he'd been asked to desist from following up his story. Apple itself doesn't list out any worldwide offices on its website but does identify Apple UAE in its map of training centres.

So there we have it. Apple is actually here on our doorstep. They're just being very, very quiet about it...

Into The Dark

Many years ago, in 2005, I was proud to be one of the sponsors an artshow called 'Into the light', which protested the Amman bombings. Today, Jordan's internet was plunged into the dark in a very different, but just as important protest.

Bloggers and website owners in Jordan are protesting the amended Press and Publications Law, putting up a black 'interstitial' page which reads, "You may be deprived of the content of this site under the amendments of the Jordanian Press and Publications Law and the governmental Internet censorship."

You can take a look yourself by popping over to pal Roba Al Assi's blog here - one of hundreds of sites in Jordan that have gone 'dark' for the day. You can click through to a pretty pissed off post behind the tarpaulin.

They're not kidding, either. The law appears to make the classic mistake, not unlike ongoing Lebanese efforts to bring the Internet into a media law, of confusing the web with print media. Under the law, websites (so badly defined it could include social media, blogs or any other online property) would be forced to join the press association, appoint an 'editor in chief' (a role with some very defined responsibilities) and also opens the door to blocking websites, something Jordan has very laudably avoided doing.

A moderate country with the most competitive telecom market in the region, tremendous intellectual capital and an important regional centre for ICT, IP and software/web development, Jordan's smart and technically capable young people deserve better than muckle-headed legislation hewn from granite by politicians who wouldn't know a website from a wombat.

Let's hope someone noticed how dark it got today...

Hands Off Sharjah!

Cultural Palace, Sharjah (Photo credit: gordontour)

Friends from Dubai made The Great Journey North and visited us many, many years ago. Arriving, they amusedly reported their eldest daughter's reaction as they crossed the border into Mordor, leaving behind the wonders of Dubai - "Oh, but Daddy, Sharjah's so very dirty!"

Years later she came to intern for me and I actually forgot to make her suffer. I'll get her next time.

Why is it that the people of Dubai so dismiss The Cultured Emirate? What is it quite that makes them look down their noses at their neighbours? This was brought to mind the other day when someone on an  expat forum kindly linked to this blog. A person was new to the UAE and was asking about Sharjah - oh, the outpouring of denigration and disgust!

Sharjah is just like Saudi, it's backward, it lacks the facilities and finesse of Dubai - on and on they go. I've lived there for nigh on twenty years now and can't say I've ever found the need to 'move to civilisation'. Not for us life in the noise of the approach to Dubai International or the power cuts and parking space denial of vengeful developers. Sharjah has long been home and there's nothing wrong with it. Sure, it's not Croydon (The Telegraph, many years ago, memorably and sniffily dubbed Jumeirah 'The Croydon of the Middle East') but then we never signed up to live in Croydon. It's the fact Sharjah is foreign makes it more fun to live in.

What about the hooch? You can drink at home or go to The Wanderers Club. What about the traffic? We drive around it. What about the strictness? It's more than balanced by tolerance. And you might like to consider how many 'banged up boozy Brit' stories have graced The Sun from Sharjah in recent years - the answer's none.

And if we want gleaming marble-floored shopping malls packed with cookie-cutter global brand chainstores, over-priced restaurants in fake souks and 'lifestyle walks', we know where we can find 'em - conveniently down the road so we can visit when we want but don't have to live with 'em on our doorstep.

Here's to Sharjah and all that's in it!