Beirut - An Explosive Thriller Reviewed

"Those looking for nonstop action, political intrigue, smatterings of sex and violence and explosions aplenty need look no further."

India Stoughton reviews Beirut - An Explosive Thriller in Lebanon's Daily Star newspaper today. The review is linked here. She doesn't let me away with much, although the review is pretty positive on the whole. Clearly in the 'liked Olives more' camp, Stoughton points out that Beirut is altogether flashier and dashier, which is a fair point.

Anyway, if the review piques your curiosity and makes you want to read a madcap international spy thriller based around a "violent, womanising alcoholic", you'll need this link here.

And if you've read Beirut - An Explosve Thriller but not left your own review on Amazon, you can always go here and air your own views on the book!

Sharjah Car Wash License Rule - Water Surprise!

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The other day I noticed the water meter cabinet was open. This turned out to be because someone had removed our water meter. Our bill was up to date. Nobody else on our street had an open cabinet.

Who would want to steal a water meter?

Bowing to the inevitable, we called SEWA (the Sharjah Electricity and Water Authority to you) to report the incident. This always means a ring round every possible phone number for them, none of which are answered until, finally, many attempts later, someone picks up the line and grunts that time honoured greeting 'Ugh' at us and almost immediately tells us to call the Halwan office, which makes it a point of pride never to answer its phone.

Down to Halwan, pick up an engineer (they never have their own transport, for some reason) and show him that yes, the meter is not there. He doesn't know why. Back to Halwan. It's been taken for checking. Apparently we're using too little water compared to everyone else on our street and so it must be a faulty meter. Of course, we aren't bathing a family of ten, watering our extensive garden, having our Indonesian maid wash six cars every morning and constantly feeding a pair of top loading twin-tubs. But oh, no. We aren't to be commended for heeding the message of the many water conservation campaigns Sharjah has launched (often starring that jolly little anthropomorphous water drop 'Mooj'). We are to be checked out as suspicious under-consumers.

Dolts.

In the meantime, we are told that Sharjah has decided to fine people who use unlicensed car washers. The fine of Dhs 250 will apply if you employ any unlicenced individual to wash your car. Licensed individuals are to be allowed to ply their trade in shopping mall car parks, service stations and car cleaning workshops. Gulf News also reports residents will also be fined Dhs500 for making puddles on the street as if that's a new thing, but that's been the case in Sharjah for many, many years.

Sadly, this move is just going to drive car washing underground and likely organised international crime syndicates will step in. Illegal car washers have already learned not to leave the wipers up as a signal the car has been washed, Gulf News tells us. Oh, the criminality of it all...

Godolphin Doping Scandal "Unacceptable"

(Photo credit: BANAMINE)

The National carries the story that was splashed in aghast tones all over the UK's media yesterday and today - Godolphin trainer Mahmoud Al Zarooni, one of Godolphin's seven trainers, is in the spotlight after eleven of 45 horses in his care tested came up positive for anabolic steroids.

It's perhaps fair to say the news has shaken horse racing in general and Godolphin in particular.

The National's story is linked here. Gulf News also covered the news, devoting 222 words in its print edition to a cut down version of the story it has posted online. The text-only print story is nestled quietly in the gutter of page three of the sports section and not referred to elsewhere in the paper.

Amusingly, the lead picture story on that GN page carries the headline, "Dubai pair to be tested in trial for Epsom Derby" but that story, of course, refers to horses being tested in the field as opposed to being tested for drugs.

Chatting about it with pals, I got the reaction that this was the sort of thing you'd expect and I do confess to disagreeing strongly with that. Godolphin has a ferocious reputation in horse-racing. It's a remarkably successful stable - and a very big operation indeed. It burst onto the scene with a winning formula - its horses are wintered in Dubai and then start the UK racing season in April in top form. The stable's first win was at Dubais' Nad Al Sheba racetrack in 1992 - since then its horses have won over 200 group one and 2,000 other races globally.

Godolphin has handled the news impeccably, making a sensible statement available promptly and announcing  a complete internal review in conjunction with the sport's authority, the BHA.

Godolphin is the Victory Team of horse-racing - it's a contender in a high profile international sport that has become about Brand Dubai in the same way as the Victory Team did - and in the same fashion. Godolphin doesn't need to cheat - the stables' manager Simon Crisford referred to Sheikh Mohammed as finding the news "completely unacceptable" and "being appalled" in his statement and I truly believe he would be. The last thing in the world Godolphin and its owner wants or needs is this because it's actually about a reputation and a brand that are respectively much greater than any horse racing prize.

One thing's certain, though. Zarooni's for the high jump...

Fake Plastic Souks - The Glory Years

Yes! It's the book of the blog! As I mentioned in one of last week's traffic-destroying booky posts, I was giving a workshop at The Archive's 'Day of Books' (nice to see HH Sheikh Mohammed dropping by and commending Safa Park's finest book haven and café) on how to use self-publishing platforms.

Trouble was, I didn't have a book to use as a sample. And then it hit me - pull the blog into a book format. It took a tad longer than I had anticipated, but resulted in the best bits of my first two years of bloggery being poured into a nice booky book shaped mould. So now you can buy Fake Plastic Souks - The Glory Years as both a print book or ebook.

I found the whole process fascinating. For a start, going back over stuff you dashed down five years ago means quite a few surprises - I enjoyed myself reading over posts from that time when Dubai was overheating like a lunar capsule re-entering earth's atmosphere and then noting the transition to abandoned cars and vicious, clueless articles in the UK's media about the Downfall of Dubai. I think that period of turbulence is quite neatly documented (but then I would, wouldn't I?).

For the workshop, we uploaded the book to Createspace - which means you can buy a printed paper booky book of the Blog from Amazon for £8.99 with next day free shipping. It then went up onto Kindle Direct Publishing, which means a Kindle book can be yours for £0.77 (Amazon's minimum price). And then we uploaded the files to Smashwords, which supports the important ePub format (Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Sony and iBooks), again pricing the ebook at $0.99. All in about 90 minutes.

One interesting learning for me was that the Kindle Direct Publishing people came back to me as a result of their validation process because they had found the content in my book was already available on the Web. They wanted to know why - and that I owned the rights to the content - before they would proceed with publishing the book to the Kindle store. They were the only one of the three platforms to do this.

I might play around with the booky book price a little, but you can quickly see how the production cost of a paper book forces the price into the stratosphere compared to ebooks. It's one reason why I now refuse to pay publishers the same price for a Kindle book they charge for a paperback. They're just being greedy and lazy. As most will know, Amazon pays a 70% royalty if you charge between $2.99 and $9.99 for your ebook, but otherwise (from $0.99 to $2.98 and $10 to $200) it pays only 35%.

It all goes to show something frequently overlooked, but actually, IMHO, quite important. You can create an ebook out of almost anything - content can make its way into peoples' hands in seconds flat and archive material, as long as it's of interest to someone, anyone, out there can be turned into a globally distributable and available asset for an investment of pretty much nada up front.

Anyway, you can now buy a bit of this blog to put on your mantelpiece or wherever else you display precious things. If I sell more than ten, I'll do a sequel!

Amazon.com

Amazon.co.uk

Smashwords

ArabNet's Coming To Dubai!

It's not often you find me parroting one of Spot On's announcements on the blog, but that's just what I'm about to do. The ArabNet Digital Summit, the regional digital conference forum event thingy, is coming to Dubai. The Beirut-based event has already spawned offshoots in Cairo and Riyadh, as well as a number of roadshows and other regional events. Now organiser Omar Christidis has decided to split ArabNet, recognising the diverse roles played by different parts of the region - Dubai, pretty much by default the Middle East's shop front for all things digital and media, is to host the conference component of ArabNet. The event will take place on the 24th-26th June if you want to mark your calendar.

That's a pretty smart move in my humble opinion*. It's long been a great truth that while the Levant is the cradle of IP creation and innovation, the GCC is the big market prize and the UAE, Dubai in particular, is where the sales operations belong - and, of course, where pretty much every regional ICT company is headquartered. Not only that, but Dubai is also home to many of the publishers and broadcasters who make up our regional media.

The event will be a three-day summit, with days devoted to start-ups, vertical industry content and developers respectively. Given that ArabNet Beirut has grown over the past three years to become easily the preeminent digital event in the region - and yes, I admit to having been originally surprised that an event of such quality took place in Beirut - putting the same thinking, strong content and agenda and organisational skills into a Dubai based event should result in something pretty special.

I have always been a strident ArabNet fan and the company wot I works for, the stellar digital communications agency Spot On Public Communications, is the event's PR partner - just so's you know and don't think I'm shilling you or anything sneaky like that...

Cartoon courtesy, of course, the ever so talented Maya Zankoul.

*BinMugahid nagged about the lack of the word 'opinion'. I gave in. In the good old days, you'd have seen that in Comments, but of course now it's debated on Twitter and Google+. *sigh*

Oh Noes! More Bookery!

English: The second generation Amazon Kindle, showing the book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It's all about books this week, but then it's London Book Fair week, so why not?

Not least of this week's book news is I'll be publishing a new book over the weekend and it's not quite what you'd expect. more below.

Meantime, I've been tweaking the MS of Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy as feedback comes in from beta readers, with quite a bit of work to do over the coming week or so. I've had to shelve it because of other commitments, of which more below...

I spent a happy 45 minutes cackling, screaming and talking in tongues in front of a mildly horrified audience of about 40 people at Dubai's More Cafe last night. I talked about books, writing, publishing and creating narrative and enjoyed myself thoroughly, as usual. The audience didn't throw things, which is always a good sign.

As I mentioned the other day, I'm trawling my way through Edward Rutherfurd's 'Paris' in readiness for my co-hostin' slot on Dubai Eye Radio's Talking of Books this Saturday. I can't say I'm getting to grips with it terribly well, but it's probably me. It's odd having to read a papery booky book rather than my preferred Kindle format - and I'm finding the whole bulk of the thing rather unwieldy to tell the truth.

And, of course, Saturday afternoon I'm giving two booky workshops at The Archive's 'Day of Books' event. Just in case you're interested they are, respectively:

3:00pm-4:30pm – ‘How Not to Write a Book’: So you’ve written a book, or you want to write a book. What DON’T you want in there? What needs to come out? How can you self-edit your work? What can you avoid ever putting in there in the first place so you don’t have to bother taking it out? Alexander McNabb guides you through a bunch of useful self editing tips.

5:00pm-6:30pm – ‘How to Publish an E-Book Step by Step’: Putting an e-book online in print and electronic formats is as easy as pie. Alexander McNabb takes you through the process step by step using a practical MS file to book example!

Here's the event link again - there are workshops by writers like Kathy Shalhoub, Frank Dullaghan,
Zeina Hashem Beck and Rewa Zeinati all through the day, with kids' stuff in the morning, more grown up stuff in the afternoon and 'readings under the stars' into the evening. Do come by!

The 'practical MS file to book example' in that second workshop I'm doing, by the way, is a compilation of my favourite bits from the first two years of this very blog. It's the easiest way I could find something at least vaguely practical or viable to publish as an e-book. Going back over the Fake Plastic archive was quite fun - it reminded me of a number of moments in the past I'd simply forgotten - it's not a bad record of that odd period when Dubai was at the height of its property-boom fuelled madness, throwing itself pell-mell at materialism, consumerism and all sorts of other isms before it smacked into a brick wall like Tom chasing Jerry as he makes it to the mousehole. That transition from quaffing bubbly to scrabbling for pennies is quite nicely covered.

I'll be publishing Fake Plastic Souks - The Glory Years for pennies on Amazon, so do look out for it! :)

What Earthquake?

Iran: Caravanserai (Photo credit: Erwin Bolwidt)

And... breathe.

It's odd to be back. It always is. There's a surreal quality to it all, wrenched away from the sunny cold of the unseasonably late UK cold snap and the bustle of family and friends back to the warm air and glitter of glass.  As usual, I didn't sleep at all on the 'red eye' flight, watching The Hobbit (quite fun) and Jack Reacher (woeful) instead.

We got home, unpacked and turned in. And proceeded to sleep through what was, today's media breathlessly assures us, the biggest earthquake to hit Iran in fifty years. The 7.8 magnitude quake shook the UAE, causing buildings to be evacuated - Gulf News found an expert who estimated the tremors that shook the UAE were equivalent to a 4.5 quake here, which does seem rather implausible, but an expert's an expert.

On the Pakistan/Iran border, near the city of Zahedan, the quake is said to have killed and injured many in both countries, although official figures appear sketchy (Iran says anything between zero and fifty dead, depending on who you listen to, while Pakistan says between four and thirty-five killed). Twitter was all a-flurry, of course.

Not that we cared, all we felt was zeds.

Meanwhile, I'm catching up with emails and clients (the day job) and contemplating tonight's 'More Talk' taking place at the Dubai International Financial Centre's More Café. Saturday is going to be busy, too - I'm doing two workshops and a reading as part of The Archive Dubai's 'Day of Books' all-day event as well as appearing on Dubai Eye Radio's 'Talking of Books' programme.

That upcoming radio appearance explains why I found a copy of Edward Rutherfurd's forthcoming novel 'Paris' on my desk when I got to work (the building was, I was glad to see, still standing). I can't say the sight filled my heart with stuff - my last 'Talking of Books' read was Jack Whyte's appalling 'Rebel', 600 pages of awful cod-Scottish dialogue and pointless meandering plot that I waded through with a black heart and weary eyes.

It's not just earthquakes I'm good at missing. Being back in the UK I managed to miss last week's TOB broadcast, which is a shame as Beirut - An Explosive Thriller was their 'Book of the Week'. I can only hope it didn't cause the programme's reviewers the pain having to read 'Rebel' caused me.

Now I've got Rutherfurd's 670 page epic to digest in a little over two days. Worst of all, the book's not published yet, so I can't get a Kindle copy. I've got to read it as a papery thing. What larks, Pip...

More Talks? Yes! More Talks!

Did you ever hear of a boy doing more talking? Dubai's favourite purple café thingy has started a series of talks by talkers which is has named, with remarkable prescience, More Talks. On the 17th April at More DIFC, starting from about 6.30pm I will be gibbering in tongues, foretelling the end of the world and otherwise acting in a publicly disgraceful and disreputable manner as befits this age when men walk backwards and cats bark like dogs.

I'll likely be talking about writing books, the impact of self publishing on the global publishing industry and our  own reading habits - as well as perhaps looking at how social media communications is changing the consumer, the reader and the whole business of marketing publications.

But then again, I'll be guided by the audience - if they'd rather talk about why PR is doomed unless it goes digital, the moral challenges of the Internet age, why the Arab World has a fraught relationship with fiction or perhaps even what my new book's about, I'll be only delighted to do that.

Anyway, you have to RSVP to come, so here's the link for you to do just that.

Jail For Lunch

Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

You think you've seen it all, but 7Days today reports on a British expat teacher in Abu Dhabi who is in police custody after being found having lunch with a man in his house. They weren't even playing pat-a-cake. She's been in nick since last weekend.

The man, a Syrian, had just shown his wife the door we are told, having thrown her out of the house last Thursday. The estranged wife, who in fact has ownership of the house, had arrived accompanied by police with the intention of asserting  her rights when it became clear that the woman, a teacher who had been brought to the house by a colleague, was found with the man consuming alcohol. The friend who had brought her had left.

The Syrian woman pressed charges against the teacher for entering her house without permission, but has since dropped those charges. The teacher is facing criminal charges of consuming alcohol and being alone in the company of a man other than her husband or close relative.

Drinking alcohol alone in the house of an Arab man you have just met is a position many women would think twice about putting themselves in, although few would think of it as a criminal offence. But the couple were arrested on the spot and have been in custody for since last weekend awaiting a court hearing. A week in jail is a long time for a drink and a chat.

There are no substantive details in the story beyond that. If you didn't know that being alone in the company of a man other than your husband or close relative is a criminal offence in the UAE, you do now.

Did you know?

GeekFest Dubai Cometh

It's just around the corner! This Thursday, even!

As I have before mentioned, the reins of GeekFest Dubai have been formally handed over (in a properly constituted Rein Handing Ceremony) to the team of fine chaps at online gamer/geek magazine t-break. It is they, not I, wot is now irresponsible for putting together GeekFest Dubai, inasmuch as a GeekFest is put together.

Just in case you haven't encountered a GeekFest before, this is the GeekiFesto, the loosely arranged set of guidelines that defines, as much as anything defines, what a GeekFest is. Most people who have UNorganised a GeekFest have gone on to happily ignore this in part or whole and it has not had the slightest negative impact whatsoever.

This does rather run in line with one's views, expressed yesterday, on conformity!

The t-break chaps have already brought a quantum leap forward in event quality and cohesiveness by putting together a microsite thingy for it. It's linked here for your viewing pleasure. The line-up of talent giving GeekTalks and displaying their digital art looks pretty stupendous - and there are even retro games for old fogeys like me as part of GameFest.

I'm only sad that old pal and co-UNfounder Saadia Zahid can't be there to see our strange and random baby grow up and leave home.

I'll see you there!

No I won't. We're off to the UK early tomorrow and we're in such bad shape I can't even begin to contemplate taking the evening out. With huge regrets, I find I can't actually make it at all and feel terribly guilty, although I'm sure the t-break team will appreciate not having me there going 'Oh no, you don't wanna do it like thaaaat.'

PS - I don't know if you'd noticed, and this is going to be by no means the last time I mention it - you can trust me on that - but there's now a really cool button down below (thanks, Derrick Pereira!) that will allow you to send any post you like from this blog direct to your Kindle or to any Kindle app on other tablets/machines. So you can treasure it, take it to bed and cuddle it and other stuff...