Book Post: The Spies Of Shemlan

The frontispiece of my prized copy of Arabia Felix. 

Note TE Lawrence was, at the time he wrote his 

foreword for Thomas' book, going under the name TE Shaw.

Conceived with the genuine intention of building bridges between the British officer and governing class and the people of the Arab World, the Middle East Centre for Arab Studies (MECAS) was founded by noted Arabist Bertram Thomas - the author of Arabia Felix, a friend of TE Lawrence's and very much a member of the 'Middle East gang' of prominent arabists connected with, among other things, Military Intelligence (the MI in MI5 and MI6). Storrs, Lawrence, Wingate, Thomas, Stark, Bell - these names trip off the tongue, but they were a highly influential little bunch of interconnected people swimming in a pond of finite size.

It's this connection with intelligence that's so hard to shake, right from the very conception of MECAS. While it may have had lofty aims, there was a whiff of sulphur connected to figures such as Thomas and his contemporary, Harry St John Bridger Philby - father of the notorious 'Kim' Philby, a man who has been connected with MECAS although it appears the connection was tenuous at best. Philby lived in Beirut for a time working for The Economist (and spying) and was said to have socialised with MECAS students. He never did study at the school.

But George Blake did. And Blake was one of the most notorious spies of the Cold War.

It was Blake who was to give the Centre a high profile student to justify Kamal Jumblatt’s assertion that MECAS was ‘A school for spies’. Blake, born George Behar in 1922, is still alive, living in exile in Moscow. He is said to have betrayed over 400 British spies in his remarkable career as a Soviet double agent - a career that ended with his in camera trial and subsequent 42-year prison sentence. The sentence was notably long, the judge finding him guilty on three separate counts of spying and handing out three maximum sentences. Newspapers at the time claimed the sentence represented a year for every British spy killed as a result of Blake's many betrayals but, fun though it sounds, it appears the claim was editorial embellishment.

A highly resourceful man who had enjoyed a remarkable career with the Dutch resistance in the war, Blake conspired to escape from Wormwood Scrubs prison in October 1966 and fled to Moscow via East Germany.

But as far as the Lebanese were concerned, it just went to prove what they’d always suspected. Up there in Shemlan, was The British Spy School. And people on the mountain still call it that – even though the Centre has long been closed and its building converted to house an orphanage. The legend lives on.

It's actually how I first found the MECAS building in Shemlan. We were looking for the Middle East Centre for Arab Studies, but understanding dawned on the puzzled face of the man we asked for directions, "Oh, you mean the British spy school!" he said.

By then I knew MECAS was going to be at the very centre of Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy. Which, incidentally, you can buy here either as an ebook or in print. See what I did there? Subtle, me...

Just A Thought...

Cover of Kate Bush

So I've been thinking about this blog thing for a while. I've enjoyed myself over the years (I've been feeding this little fire for over SIX years now and likely written more words for it than I have for my books!), generally amused myself greatly and anecdotally have gathered I have occasionally provided amusement (and irritation) to others.

Nothing like the amusement provoked by the wicked and scurrilous Pan Arabia Enquirer, for instance, with its gigantic, tottering piles of 400,000 page views a month, but I have managed some mild jollity among a small, selective band of discerning blog readers and a much larger troupe of disappointed searchers for more sensible things hornswoggled by Google into emerging here rather than somewhere more useful.

I never had an objective in it all, as such. For someone whose day job revolves around defining communications objectives and the like, it's been refreshing. A little like GeekFest, I suppose it has been an anti-PR activity that has come by sheer error to have some sort of reputational value, although any reputational plus has been balanced by the alarm and calumny of being quite as frank as I have on occasion been in here. What makes it special, as Kate Bush tells us, makes it dangerous.

I don't mean to alarm you, by the way. I'm not jacking it in or anything like that. But I am perhaps going to destroy any vestigial traffic by spending more time on what has become the most intense focus in my life - books. Or more accurately, narrative.

I'm going to start posting book reviews, for instance. I've wasted them over at GoodReads in the same way a TripAdvisor review is wasted - just another voice in the thousands of contributions. I'd rather have 'em here in my own archive, tell the truth. We'll see where that takes us, but if you want to submit your book for review, I wouldn't expect much sugar-coating from around here.

Oh, I'm going to go on slapping Gulf News for being drooling morons and playing with things that pass by on life's conveyor belt and make you wonder quite what it's all about. How could I not? But I'm doing more and more book stuff in my life and I think that's going to be represented here more.

Sorry if that's not good news - I know book posts and the like kill blog traffic more effectively than the Car Eating Carrion Crow of Cephalon Cinque - but it's sort of where I'm headed and I've become quite fond of my blog, so where I'm headed, I guess the blog'll come too - peeing on the lamp posts and sniffing other blog's bums...

That's all folks...

PS: I found an excuse to put a picture of Kate Bush on the blog. My life is complete...

The ExpatWoman Festive Family Fair. Oh Yeah.

UPDATE

With rain forecast for Dubai tomorrow (Saturday) and no indoor venue available, the ExpatWoman Family Fair has been rescheduled to Jan 25th (the next sensible date to hold it). So I won't be signing books and refusing to wear a Santa hat, but will provide more info nearer the rescheduled date.

UPDATE 2 
(Saturday evening)
Unbelievable. Not a drop of rain fell all day. Some fluffy clouds, a couple of darker ones, but no rain at all or even realistic chance of rain. EW took the right decision - given the forecast - for sure, but how could the forecast have been so signally wrong? Damn the weatherman!

Trips off the old tongue, don't it? This Saturday - the 23rd November - will see ExpatWoman.com hosting their annual festive shindig at Dubai's Polo & Equestrian Club, opposite Arabian Ranches. Not normally something I'd be burbling about on the blog, but there's something special in store for visitors this year.

Oh yes.

From 10.30am to 4.30pm, you have the opportunity to visit Santa's Grotto, get the kids face painted and visit various stalls selling festive femed crafts and goodies. There's a petting zoo, so little Johnny has the chance to get savagely mauled by a Chinchilla. In short, it's the usual Craggy Island deal including, we can only hope, a goat stuck in the Ferris wheel. Except, of course, it's on a Dubai scale, with nigh on a hundred stalls and a polo match thrown in.

But that's not all by any means. Because this year you can make your way over to the golden podium upon which shall rest copies of Olives - A Violent Romance and Beirut - An Explosive Thriller. These shall be signed and given over to unsuspecting members of the general public in return for Reasonable Emolument. They make, needless to say, perfect Christmas presents, ideal gifts for friends and family and fabulously combustible material for igniting the Yule log.

It wasn't my idea, honest. I was chatting with the ExpatWoman gang and they came up with the scheme in jest. Like all too many jests, it has become an horrific reality. I have made it clear: I'll sign books happily, but I'm not wearing the bloody santa hat.

See you there!

The Scatter Here Is Too Great: In Conversation With Bilal Tanweer

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Last night marked the final day of the Sharjah International Book Fair 2013 and the pre-launch of Bilal Tanweer's debut novel, The Scatter Here Is Too Great. The fair was silly enough to foist me on Bilal as his host and we decided on a Q&A about the book and a reading or two as a suitable way to pass an hour on a Saturday evening.

The actual launch will take place in Goa, with Random House presumably splashing out for luxury yachts, dancing girls, champagne and cake. And then there are launches in London, Paris and New York. Let's face it, start in Sharjah and you can hardly go wrong in your upwards trajectory of launch events.

Bilal managed to dig up an ARC (Advance Review Copy, silly) for me earlier in the week, which rather put the pressure on given my already extensive TBR (To Be Read list. DO try and keep up with the jargon, would you?) and beta reading commitments. The book was a pleasure to read (I was its first 'general public' reader as it's still in production) - I accused Bilal of doing the same to the good people of Karachi as James Joyce had done to Dubliners with Ulysses and he couldn't muster any disagreement ("When a dog fouls the carpet, you rub its nose in it. Ulysses was my attempt to do the same for the Irish people") - The Scatter Here is Too Great is a book with a varied cast of characters muddling through in a mixture of joy, horror, sickness, health, youth and old age. It's rarely a book that spares the reader strong and pungent description of a city that Bilal admits he loves and loathes.

From the little boy who is teased for his teeth and called parrot, parrot through to the repo man in his immersion in an increasingly violent cycle as he struggles through life, the book is packed with horror and violence, yet there's also life, laughter and love in there. It's a heady mixture of influences, characters and cameos. The violence is rarely explicit, yet implied throughout the book.

And so we talked about it, about these people and the city that spawned them, the bomb that forms the hole in the windscreen that all these cracked lives revolve around as they dance their dance of life and death. Tempus duly fugitted and we found ourselves standing blinking at the end of Q&A with the audience.

An odd but rewarding week, then, in which I have been introduced to two charming Pakistani writers whose work I have enjoyed and whose company it has been a pleasure to find myself in.

In the meantime, Jashanmal sold out of their SIBF stock of Beirut - An Explosive Thriller and that made me glad...

Guest Book Post: Bubblecow On Show - Don't Tell

There’s a critical problem dooming your book and you may not even realize!

At BubbleCow, we’ve edited more than 800 books. That’s a lot of books! One thing that this unique level of editing allows is for us to see beyond the problems with any single book and look at the wider picture.

That’s how we know that many writers face a problem that they don’t even understand exists.

The problem is… Emotion!

To be more precise, the problem is making your readers feel REAL emotion.

We are not talking about readers feeling emotion for a character, along the lines of ‘Oh, how sad that they died’, but your words and story triggering a true emotion in a reader.

I know this all sounds wishy washy, but stick with me.

I am sure you’ve read a book that made you cry! Think about it. I am betting that if a book has made you cry that you can still remember that book to this day. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if you can still recall the exact moment you were reading that book, as tears rolled down your cheeks.

That’s the writer triggering true emotion. That’s the writer delving into your heart and ripping out feelings that leave you emotionally altered…. Now that’s writing!

If you are writing from a third person perspective (that is when the narrator is separate from the story and not one of the characters in your book, that’s first person), then you probably face a problem that you’ve never considered.

Writers become so consumed by TELLING the story, that they forget that the reader is actually part of the process. The reader is part of the story. They are not a passive observer; they are an active component in the process. The moment your reader becomes passive, they turn off, get bored and, eventually, stop reading.

If you TELL a reader that a character is sad, all you do is add a twist to the plot. What you don’t do is make the reader feel the sadness of your character.

This is important. There’s a world of difference between a reader knowing the character is sad and FEELING the character’s sadness.

What you must do, if you are to trigger emotion in a reader, is SHOW them how the character is reacting and then let the reader fill in the gaps.

If… you write with emotional honesty and with a universal truth, the character’s actions will trigger an emotion in the reader. On feeling this emotion, the reader is immediately engaged with your work on a new level.

In other words, by SHOWING not TELLING you are creating a narrative space between the reader and the characters. Because you are not telling the reader how to think and feel this leaves a narrative gap. The reader then leans into this gap and fills it with their own emotion.
Ok… These are big words, but let me show you an example.

Let’s imagine a scene where a young boy has just opened a birthday present to find a book he has been asking for all year.

Here’s the scene written with TELL:


John lifted the present from the table. His heart was filled with joy. He was happy to see the brightly colored wrapping paper. He pushed his finger into the paper and ripped a tiny hole. He was excited. He peeked inside, his heart racing with anticipation. Unable to control himself he ripped open the paper to find the book he had been dreaming of reading.


OK, not Shakespeare but you get my drift.

Now let’s look a little closer at what I’ve written. In the second sentence, we TELL the reader that John’s heart was ‘filled with joy’. In the next sentence, we TELL the reader he was ‘happy’. In the fifth sentence, we TELL the reader he was ‘excited’ and in the next, that his ‘heart was racing’.
This is a lot of TELL and leaves no space between John and the reader. In this section we are being told by the writer how John is feeling. We are not allowing the reader to draw their own conclusions.

Now… here’s the same scene with all the TELL removed and replaced by SHOW:

John lifted the present from the table. It was a small package wrapped in red and blue wrapping paper, the colors creating a smooth swirl under his fingers. A smile crept onto his lips as he brushed the paper. He glanced from the present to his mother, his grin spreading to a smile. He held the present at arms length for a moment, his hand shaking. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, small breaths pushing from his lips.

The boy returned his gaze to the present. He removed his left hand and extended his middle finger into a poke. His head moved forward, his expression now one of concentration. His finger pushed at the paper, ripping a tiny hole. He leaned in even further, peering into the darkness.

A slight squeal slipped from his lips, an explosion of a smile on his face. Holding the present with his right hand, he ripped at the paper with his left. Long strips came away and were discarded to the floor. A small brown book sat in his right hand. John brushed the cover with the tips of the fingers on his left hand. He stood motionless for a moment, his eyes glistening with moisture. He looked at his mother and mouthed the words ‘thank you’.


The first thing to notice is that the scene is longer. The reason is that the moment we can no longer short cut by simply TELLING the reader what is happening, we are forced to add in description. This is what I call ‘crafting’. I have tried to conjure an image in your mind. If I am not going to write ‘John opened the present’, then I need to accept that I need more words.

The second thing of note is that I’ve tried to write with an emotional truth. I’ve tried to remember what it felt like to receive a present as a child. I’ve also plumbed my own memories of my own children receiving presents. The result, I hope, is a scene that has a universal truth. If I have managed to access this truth, this scene should trigger an emotion in the reader.

Finally, I’ve created a space between John and the reader. I’ve not TOLD you how John is feeling, I’ve just described his actions. It is left to the reader to interpret these actions. This is where I hope to trigger the emotion in the reader. As the reader fills the gap they are forced to tap into their own feelings of the joy of receiving a present. If I’ve managed it, then this suddenly turns into a powerful scene.

And that’s Show, Don’t Tell in action.

I feel strongly that this single technique can turn the most pedestrian of books into an engaging work that readers will remember. No, let’s scrub that. I know that this is true. I’ve seen it happen time and again. In fact, I’ve based our whole business on it! At BubbleCow, Show, Don’t Tell, is the backbone of the editorial approach we take to books written in third person. In fact, we feel it is so important, that we have created a free book to help teach writers how to use this technique in their own writing.

Let’s finish with a little writing trick that can work wonders. It’s called the ‘camera technique’. When writing a scene, imagine you are observing the scene through a camera. Now, just write what the cameraman can see. No thoughts, no short cuts, just the action. The result will be a scene packed full of SHOW and devoid of TELL.


Gary Smailes is the owner of BubbleCow, a company that helps self-publishing writers to produce publishable books. They provide book editing and proofreading.

In Conversation With Mohsin Hamid

Cover of The Reluctant Fundamentalist

I'll have to be honest here: I was dreading meeting Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid. I had read his second novel, the Booker-nominated The Reluctant Fundamentalist, with enormous enjoyment.

Given the man behind the book was a Princeton-educated management consultant (a species for which I have an instant aversion), I couldn't quite imagine what I was walking into when I agreed to host his appearance at the Sharjah International Book Fair, but it was probably something around a bi-cultural jerk in a suit with an affected proto-American drawl and a superiority complex.

Quite why I ever thought that was the case is beyond me, but then I was the bloke prepared to batter the world's most pleasant literary agent on stage with a tyre lever, so I've got form in the 'getting these things horribly wrong' stakes.

Mohsin Hamid turned out, of course, to be charming, affable, witty and passionate - a sparkling intelligence with an abiding curiosity. The accent was more British than anything else, a product of Pakistan's school system. We quickly agreed on how we would structure our chat and took to the two chairs on stage. We ran through Mohsin's motivations in writing, his first book, Moth Smoke, which he had taken seven years to complete and which gained him near-instant prominence before The Reluctant Fundamentalist cemented his reputation as a startlingly original writer who creates strong voices that subtly direct us to ask ourselves difficult questions we might otherwise conveniently avoid.

We talked about using 'voices' in writing and how Mohsin had consistently made life difficult for himself by choosing unusual voices and structures in his writing - about the influence of living in London, the US and Lahore and always writing about the place you weren't in, secularism and Lahore's underground scene and about how you watch your book being turned into a Hollywood movie. The time flew.

Mohsin read from the opening of The Reluctant Fundamentalist and I got something of a shock. I'd seen that voice as a sing-song Pakistani accent but Mohsin cleared that up as completely as he'd confounded my mean-minded expectation of him: from reduced circumstances, our man has a slightly old-school colonial Englishness to him. He's not jabbering, his voice is measured and reflects the reassurance he constantly offers his clearly nervous dinner guest. Given the entire book is a monologue, that voice cleverly modulated between the present day conversation and the reminiscence of a tragic love affair, the revelation was not inconsiderable. As Mohsin pointed out, everyone puts something of themselves into reading a well-written book and thereby changes it and as a consequence takes away something different, too.

We also talked about Mohsin's new book, How To Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia and how he struggled with the book's format before he came about the idea of writing it in the second person in the style of a self-help book. We timed out - the room was needed for the next gig and we had to cut questions from the audience short all too quickly. I blame the sloppy moderator myself.

If you missed it, you missed a highly entertaining hour listening to a charming, interesting and self-deprecating man whose work is as remarkable as it is readable. So sucks to you.

I would argue SIBF hasn't done enough to promote the author events taking place there - but if you missed Mohsin, you can still catch up with another Pakistani writer from the 'Lahore scene' on Saturday as I try and mess up the launch of Bilal Tanweer's The Scatter Here is Too Great. We'll be doing a fireside chat (minus the fireside, clearly), a reading and generally celebrating the release of this new novel by Random House.

That's November 16th, 7:15-8:15pm, the Book Forum at Sharjah Exhibition Centre in Al Nahda. There's no excuse not to come from Dubai, the traffic's fine on a Saturday evening.

Neologist Nomenclature

(Photo credit: Frank Kehren)

If you searched 'Neologist nomenclature' and you're for real, I apologise. I just wasted your time.

Hot on the heels of the news Dubai's Roads and Transport Authority is to commence a mega-project to name some 22,000 of the city's streets comes Abu Dhabi's pledge to do the very same thing. The two cities have long had a street numbering system in place, but now we're going to get real road names.

As eny fule no, navigation in the Gulf has traditionally been a matter of using landmarks. I recall with delight the early days of my life tramping around the region and discovering I was to spend my day looking for 'the red office building to the right of French Corner, just down Talateen Street from the big Pepsi hoarding' and similar locations. I spent many a joyous hour in Riyadh's insane traffic (back then, they'd shove you from behind into a roundabout if you hesitated in joining the choking stream), perplexed and deeply lost. This is also, incidentally, frequently how I pass my time in Abu Dhabi, the words 'don't worry, it's really easy to find' instantly plunging icy shards of horror into my soul.

Those popular landmarks were to lend their names to roundabouts and roads, areas even. So Dubai, for instance, gained 'Bank Street', 'Budgie Roundabout', 'Chicago Beach', 'Fish Roundabout' and the like. Sharjah got 'Mothercat', 'Flying Saucer' and - of course - 'National Paints'.

Now they're all going to be renamed. Sharjah already renamed all its roundabouts as squares years ago, to the perplexity of many. And it already has street names, each more impenetrable than the last. This has also been the case in Riyadh, where long-standing roads such as 'Pepsi Cola' and 'Airport' have been renamed with dignitaries' full names. The joy of finding out you actually wanted Abdulaziz bin Sultan bin Abdulrahman Al Saud street when you finally made your way to Abdulaziz bin Abdulrahman bin Sultan Al Saud street was always a marvel to behold.

And so, I fear, it will be in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. The usual pandering will take place and we'll start with Prominent People With Long Names. Then great historical figures - the usual astrologers, mathematicians, travellers (hands up who wants to live in Ibn Battuta Street, then?) and transmuters of lead to gold. Then they'll get desperate and start using desert animals and the like. If I know Dubai, there'll be an auction to let companies sponsor a street name.

I can't keep up. I'm already having issues remembering what I'm supposed to call the Emirates Road these days, let alone Diyafah street and, of course, remembering it's now the Al Fahidi Cultural Neighbourhood. Like many others, I suspect, I'll likely keep directing people using the Emarat before Satwa Bus Station rather than whatever new name gets slapped on the street our office building is on.

Why they don't use the 'popular' names, I'll never know. Although I always thought 'Budgie Roundabout' disrespectful - especially with the descriptor popularly appended...

Abu Dhabi Bans Silly String

(Photo credit: mikecogh)

One of my favourite jokes of all time is that people in Dubai don't understand the Flintstones, while Abu Dhabi do.

Sorry, silly string brought that to mind. And you won't be finding much of it around on December 2nd in Abu Dhabi, because it's been banned - along with 'unofficial' car parades, car painting and a range of other popular national day activities.

The warnings come nice and early, but then reports are already tumbling in about car decoration workshops doing Dhs20,000 makeovers in preparation for the UAE's 42nd National Day which takes place on the aforementioned 2nd December. If Dubai gets Expo 2020, the result due in on November 27th, they're going to completely lose the head all across that weekend.

I've said before that the UAE is the only place in the Middle East where the people take to the streets to celebrate their country, and that they most certainly do. It's a happy time and a time to go wombat crazy and generally make like it's mardi gras, but police around the Emirates have had enough and over the past couple of years have moved to regulate a celebration that at times looks as if it could border on hysteria.

So no changing the colour of your car, obscuring your number plate, having your windscreen tinted with pictures of the UAE's leaders or the flag, no tinting the driver side windows, no hanging out of cars or over-stuffing cars and no, and I'd like to make this quite clear, no silly string.

If you breaks the rules, it's a Dhs1,000 fine and 12 black points. And Abu Dhabi police have set aside a special area for impounded cars on the day. Presumably other emirates' police forces will enforce similar rules, although I haven't seen any announcements.

Sharjah Corniche will doubtless once again be packed and there, I am sure, you will find silly string.

Rent Hike Pain. We Are SO Back, Baby

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Today's The National reports on a 50% increase in Dubai landlord/tenant cases going to law on the back of rental increases that have topped as much as 40% year on year.

Sure enough, the news that we're back in the property-flipping, mega-development real estate boomtastic jetstream has filtered down to landlords, who have had to deal with a good five lean years as Dubai's over-heated 2008 rental prices dropped like a stone circling a black hole, resulting in a market awash with a glut of unwanted housing.

Nowadays, we're looking at undersupply of rental property - I've come across several people who've actually found it hard to find a flat, particularly at reasonable prices. And the news that we're back has prompted landlords to take the fast boat to rent increase paradise and just evict their current tenants at the end of their one-year contract.

Except you can't do that anymore - there's a pesky property law in place now and what's more it's actually being enforced. Dubai's got a sparkly new property tribunal which means wronged tenants (and, yes, wronged landlords) can take their case to law quickly and get a settlement - and in the meantime property regulator RERA hears cases.

That law has two fascinating clauses. The first relates to the RERA rental calculator, a basket of average prices which is used to calculate permissible increases in rent for landlords, the 'average similar rent'.

Decree No. 2 of 2011 on rentals in Dubai states that increases in rent are allowed as follows:

Up to 25% below the average similar rent = no increase. 26-35% = 5% maximum increase. 36-45% = 10% increase. 46-54% = 15% increase and 55% less than the average similar rent = 20% maximum increase.

In other words, even if your property rental price is less than half the RERA calculated market average (which is itself often less than market 'asking prices'), your landlord can only increase the rental by 20%

Ah, but he can just chuck you out at the end of your rental in any case. Well, actually, no he can't.

Dubai's property law states a landlord must give a tenant 12 months' notice to vacate a property AND have good reason to do so. The usual canard is that he's moving himself or his family back in. Fine, but the law actually states he has to prove he has no suitable other property for this purpose AND if he does re-let the property, the original tenant is due compensation.

So there's actually pretty comprehensive protection in place for tenants - and it seems more and more are actually taking to seeking recourse. You'd have thought landlords would be aware of the law and take care to work within this very clear framework, but the lure of those rental increases appears to be a strong one and they're trying it on.

They're much less likely to do so when people are clearly aware of the law and their rights within it, of course.

BOOK POST: Shemlan and the Big C

Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy is about a man with terminal cancer whose journey into his past  to find the lost love of his life stirs up a hornet's nest that threatens to kill him before the disease does.

I so far have not had, but am fully expecting, the reaction 'But I don't want to read a book about someone dying of cancer.'

I genuinely hadn't given it a moment's thought until I hit the 'go' button on the various publishing platforms I've used. But then I've never really set out to make life easy for myself with this whole book thing.

I can even sympathise with that reaction. I suffered it myself to a certain degree when the book was being conceived.

Jason Hartmoor was born when Barry Cook came to stay with us back in 2008. I posted about his visit on the blog a while afterwards and I do heartily recommend you take a read. Barry had been fighting off cancer for ten years and was desperately ill. I had dreaded the visit - we knew we were going to be playing host to a terminally ill cancer patient and had both steeled ourselves for a pretty hellish three days. We were to be totally blindsided by what happened next.

"I didn't stop laughing, or smiling, for the next 72 hours. Not only were our visitors delightful company, Barry was nothing short of inspirational. Although he'd get the odd twinge of pain in his back and needed to take enzymes to aid his digestion, he was more on top of a disease so chronic that an x-ray of his skeleton showed the cancer was so widespread it was like 'someone had thrown a handful of sticky rice grains at it' than I could ever have imagined. He'd been fighting it for ten years and was still beating it back."

And so was born the Roxanol and enzyme popping Jason Hartmoor. The resemblance ends there, Barry was a charismatic, laughing man with enough charm and twinkle for ten. But I had been building a 'challenged' character and Barry's condition - with its inevitable end - wriggled its way into that character. I think Barry himself crept into Hartmoor every now and then - Jason's lighter, more human moments are probably Barry breaking through.

I've often talked about how authors 'steal' people. This is the ultimate example, stealing a dying man. But blag away I did. My only defence is that it wasn't intentional.

I didn't want to make Hartmoor's condition harrowing or graphic in itself, at least in part because Barry had shown me having cancer doesn't necessarily mean every day is spent recalling your last chemo session or the day you first found out. After ten years, it had settled into a sort of 'business as usual' for him. Hartmoor gets tired: he fatigues easily and has to depend on The Hated Stick more than he would like to - increasingly so as the book progresses. He's frail, his routines are those of a man who depends absolutely on his medication - particularly the painkillers. But his disease has become a fact of life for him, a constant companion he has reached a sort of understanding with.

The constancy of Roxanol, by the way, was the reason I was so taken by the cover image, by Australian artist Gerrard King. But more of that another time...

So I wouldn't let the fact there's a man with cancer at the heart of Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy stop you reading it. In fact, I'd rather like to think it was yet another reason TO read it.

The link's to the right of this post. Do it now before you forget...