A New Book Is Born

So the order's gone in to Createspace for WH Smith's stock of Birdkill (as well as my other books) to sell at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature 2016, where said book will debut/launch. It's up on Amazon for pre-order and I'm formatting the Kindle ebook today so the file will be ready to go 'live' then. Smashwords, too, with the ePub (which will populate iBooks, Kobo et al).

Five books. Wow.

I'll be doing pretty minimal book promotion, less even than A Decent Bomber got, which resulted in its enormous complement of one review on Amazon. I don't really care greatly, to be honest. I'll have to buck up my ideas by the time we get to the LitFest, won't I?

In the meantime, here's some stuff about the new book scraped from my lovely website.

Robyn closed her eyes and steadied herself as the spinning sensation faded. The rain pattered on the window and she tried to cast her mind back to the yawning lacuna in her past, as she did every night when she found herself with nothing to distract her. Peel away the onion skins, reach into the blackness. As always, it skittered away, elusive just beyond her grasp. Frustrating, shapeless things evaded her; try as she might, they wouldn’t come back. 

What's Birdkill about? 
It's about a woman called Robyn Shaw who takes a job teaching at a school for especially gifted children after she's been through a trauma in Lebanon. She's not sure what happened to her, because her mind's shut the incident down and nobody's very keen to tell her very much about it. Shipped back to London, Robyn goes through counselling, where she meets Mariam Shadid, who becomes her best friend. Mariam's originally Lebanese herself, a journalist based in London.

Robyn's very fragile and her world starts to unravel when she meets a group of children playing in the woods by the school buildings. One of them is calling birds from the air and twisting their necks. He sees her and calls her to him, she knows to the same fate. Her battle for sanity against the boy, who is a student at the school, is also a battle against her past and its suppressed memories. Mariam goes in search of answers before Robyn is pitched over the edge into madness.

It sounds more 'psychological' than the guns and bombs of Beirut or, say, A Decent Bomber... 
It is, very much so. Quite a lot of the writing I get up to is inspired by dreams and Birdkill was the result of a particularly vivid dream which I noted down in the form of a short story, written sometime in the last 1980s. It sat in a file since then, a few sheets of stapled-together paper I'd sent to Sarah back when she lived in Sharjah and I lived in Northampton and we used to write to each other.

I found it again when I'd finished A Decent Bomber and suddenly the book was there, wriggling in my hands like a live thing. I wrote Birdkill in six weeks. A Decent Bomber had taken me two years and Birdkill was a sort of massive sigh of relief.

Sister Mary craned forward to pinpoint the whump of rotors. The helicopter dropped from the mountains to skim the city rooftops like a fat, mottled fly. It rocked to a landing on the roof of the far wing of the hospital. Men ran doubled up under the still-whirring blades to wrench open doors. 

There's that link back to Lebanon again. I thought you'd been told to get out of the Middle East? 
Yes, but then I've given up trying to please those people. Lebanon, Zahlé in particular, just sort of shouldered its way into the book and I let it. Of the many wonders you'll find in Zahlé, the Chateau Ksara is probably the most international. It's Robyn's memories of Zahlé and her time in a school there that are repressed, so you could argue that it's all a metaphorical reference to that 'get out of the Middle East' thing. The Middle East isn't letting me go without a struggle. The book's actually set somewhere in England, although it's never quite specified where the school, the Hamilton Institute, is based.

The Audi TT held tight to the tarmac and Robyn revelled in the car’s electric surge around the corner as she pressed it. The road was wet, russet clouds of leaves thrown up by her passing. She flew to her new beginning, her mind having shut out much of her recent past. 

There's quite a lot of Ksara in there. And a lot of Audi TT, too. 
Yes, proof reader Katie Stine gave me a hard time over that, but I let the book have its rope and it wanted Robyn to be car-mad and love her Audi TT. And so it was. The first scene in the book to pop into my head beyond the kids in the woods and sparrows was an Audi TT driving through the dark to a new beginning. And so we have it. Have you tasted Ksara? It needs no excuses for being in the book. Wonderful stuff. I'm particularly fond of the rosé.

There's a theme of suppression and repression in the book...
Robyn's memories and the incident that led to her amnesia being hushed up are sort of key to it all. And Robyn's safe as long as her amnesia continues, while Mariam's efforts to find out what happened to her friend are well-intended but ultimately threaten Robyn's destruction. There's a lovely line in an early Wire song, Marooned: "An unwilling sailor adrift from Arctic waters, as the water gets warmer, my iceberg gets smaller."

The dream was still rotten in Robyn’s head when she surfaced to the wan light and the peeping of her cheap little Ikea alarm clock. She hadn’t pulled the curtain and was rewarded with a view of relentless cloud. She was warm, but her hand struck out from under the duvet and found cool air. She’d have to suss out how the heating worked. Her grasping fingers touched plastic and she batted at the thing. The clock skittered across the bedside table and crashed to the floor still chirping. 

Robyn's dreams leave her waking up with them 'still rotten in her head'. Is that your dream experience? 
No, just as much as Paul Stokes in Olives isn't me, either. I enjoy my dreams in the main - they lead to scenes, ideas and whole books. Robyn's dreams of the Void drain her. The threat of Martin's abilities, however real they are, is that they could unlock the Void and Robyn comes to fear that more than anything else. There are hints of schizophrenia in there, aspects of troubled sexuality breaking through. You'd probably have DM Thomas' The White Hotel to thank for that.

So what's next? 
I have not, in a perfectly cheery way, got the faintest clue. I'm in no hurry. I'm sure I'll dream something up...

HERE'S THE 'MONEY SHOT' - THE LINK TO PRE-ORDER BIRDKILL.

Talking Of Books Reviews A Decent Bomber

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In a little under half an hour, Dubai Eye Radio's 'Talking of Books' program will review A Decent Bomber. Half an hour after that, they'll be interviewing me about the book.

I can't pretend I'm not a little nervous. For a start, this isn't really a great time to be talking about terrorism in your novel. But beyond that, it's a very public grilling for the book. Will they love it? Hate it? Be 'meh'?

I can't get a thing done. I'm just marking time. *sigh*

Time. Ulp. Listening in. Here we go. Oh golly, they liked it...

A book of real quality. Sensitively drawn characters. A book of real style and you find yourself experiencing, smelling Ireland. This is tangibly plausible. I love the complexity of the character of Pat. What I liked particularly about the book was that the plot never stopped to explain characters, the dialogue and plot carry their development. The dialogue is very natural, he has a very fine ear, McNabb. It was real and honest, the dialogue was true to the characters. They're frightening, the characters. It's a white-knuckle ride and a real page-turner.

This isn't a light book. It's a line-up of misery and pain. There's no plot humour, but the dialogue has lovely touches of gentle irony, very Irish humour. This is an extremely good book, more than a thriller, you could draw parallels with Le Carré.

Clearly a book to buy, people... :)

The interview was fun. They didn't like Boyle and Mary's shenanigans and I explained I wasn't so happy myself, two of my characters just ran away and did stuff they weren't supposed to.

Did I pick the name Pat O'Carolan for a reason? As it happens, yes, the troubador was a knowing reference and Pat was Sarah's Uncle Pat, whose wee farm up in Cummermore started the whole scheme going. Orla wasn't supposed to have the romantic involvements she ended up with, either.

How come conventional publishing hadn't picked me up? Dunno, these days don't really care that much either. I explained how Shemlan, my last book, had been about a man dying of cancer whose life is revealed to have been utterly pointless to him, about how I'm cruel to my characters. And about how that - or a book about an ex-IRA man - might not gel with what a risk-averse publisher's idea of a self-marketing book was.

Why thrillers, there are elements of literary fiction in here? That was nice of them to say, but I like to think I write a smart thriller. thrillers are fun, although Birdkill - my next book - is a little more complicated on a psychological level and perhaps a little more screwed up generally.

I told about how my developmental editor/reader for Beirut had told me to put more 'gunplay' into the book and how I regret having taken that advice, now preferring to rebel rather than produce formulaic books that are 'on genre'. They liked the interplay between Driscoll and MacNamara, the politicians in A Decent Bomber who are trying to pretend this stuff isn't happening. I confessed I had enjoyed playing with the idea that they are conflicting with the PSNI where before they had fought the RUC, but this time they were denying themselves rather than last time when they had been asserting themselves.

It's amazing how quickly half an hour can pass when you're talking about your books, but pass it did. I'll post the podcast when it comes around. So far I've sold a tad over sixty books in all. We're hardly troubling the NYT list here, people...

Book Marketing And McNabb's Theory Of Multitouch

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I clearly want to tell the world about A Decent Bomber. This is perfectly natural, it's my latest book and took two years to write, in all. It's taken a lot to get it 'right'. A little shouting from the rooftops is therefore perfectly in order.

I would dearly like people to buy it, read it and - ideally - enjoy it. And then I would like them to pester their friends to buy it, read it and enjoy it. By repeating this process, a number of happy people will, in turn, make me happy. It's a virtuous cycle.

There is, however, a large, green-skinned and particularly gnarly troll-thing in the way. Book Marketing.

How do you get people to buy books? It's a problem I don't have a single, elegant solution to. This has surprised me a little, because marketing and communications are very much a part of the day job, so you'd have thought I'd have some clue. And I don't. Any more than publishing companies do. And, believe me, they're pretty much utterly clueless. It used to be nice and easy, but their world has changed. The seasonal catalogues and sales reps thing is no longer the force it once was. I'd shed a tear for 'em, but you know how it is...

Over the years, I have come to realise that books aren't sold with a single 'touch'. Rarely do we see a review of a book and go 'Gosh, I really must have that book right now!' In fact, I can trace the immediate results of reviews reflected directly in my Amazon sales the day they 'break' and I can assure you positive reviews in national media or on popular book review websites result in not one direct book sale. Dittoes for interviews. As for 'book blog tours' I shudder at the very thought of the device, let alone would I consider undertaking one. Like promoting books on writer's sites, it's the blind screaming at the blind.

So all is lost, then? Well, not quite. It's not that reviews are useless per se. They're part of the wider picture. A reader sees a good review, then hears about that same book from a friend, gets caught by another mention of the book and then, ideally, either is persuaded to click on a link or views the book in a physical location. That could be a bookshop or another book-buying opportunity such as an author event - a signing or some such. I have come to believe that three to five 'touches' are needed, ideally one having some form of call to action, before a book sale takes place. I have often said, the last 'touch' should ideally be from me in your ear as you're standing in a bookshop wondering what to do next.

This is not easy to accomplish. Believe me, I've thought about ways you could do it and, reluctantly, drawn a blank. A halfway house would be ensuring that I 'feed' that positive review back into my marketing channels. What you may find depressing is that if you are in any way connected with me, you have just become a 'marketing channel'. So if I haven't stolen your runaway nasal hair or braying laugh to use in one of my characters, I've abused you at the marketing end of the process. One way or another, if you know me, I'm going to use you. And the fact I have not lost one wink of sleep over this tells you what an irredeemable shit this whole book writing thing has made me become.

So, existentialist angst apart, how do you scream 'buy my book!' at someone five times without them punching you?

That's the million dollar question. Clearly, I've been following a 'content strategy' in building awareness of A Decent Bomber. I've done this to a degree with all four books, although Olives got far more attention, including a 'blog of the book'. While this was enormously time consuming, it did have an impact on overall awareness and therefore a smaller but discernible impact on sales. The amount of effort invested vs returns in terms of sales was ridiculous, one aspect of occupying a small market where scale doesn't really count. And McNabb's Law of Clicks applies, depressingly.

So we have reviews out with reviewers (the first one's already in, in fact: "The plot is complex. You must pay attention. You will reap a lot of enjoyment if you do. This is a great story... I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Most readers will jump on the thrill train and get the ride of their lives. In this genre, who could ask for anything more?") and posts about the book and its 'book hooks' (Bombs, the IRA, things Irish, new terror vs old terror. That kind of thing) have been appearing here on the blog. Occasional reminders have gone out to the mailing list and we're building up towards launch. Blog posts get pimped across to Facebook and Google+, Twitter is, as always, a great link-pointing machine.

We are, in short, ticking all the boxes, using a content-led approach to gain your permission to witter at you and wear you down until you resignedly pop off to Amazon and click on that A Decent Bomber pre-order link. Once that pre-order date is past, the book has to generate buzz and recommendation from people - it has, in short, to stand on its own two feet.

What amazes me, to be honest, is how I've found the energy to do all this again. It's Sisyphean, it really is. But found it I have and as a consequence you, you poor thing, are being subjected to new levels of outrageous book pluggery...

The link's here. You know what you have to do...

Book Research Madness

It's funny, but it's not until you set out to write a book you realise how little stuff you know. I've said it before but can't help repeating it - I don't know how writers did this before Google. Really.

Yet again, how researching A Decent Bomber didn't get me nicked, I don't know. Surely someone, somewhere is looking out for people from the Middle East displaying an interest in supplies of ammonium nitrate and detonators? Maybe they are, and a whole team of over-excited NSA types has just been stood down. 'Calm down, lads, it's just another bloody author'...

I now know how you make a one ton bomb. It's a bit like being able to touch your nose with your tongue. There's not much call for the skill...

Meeting former IRA man Brendan Curran was a big deal for me, not least because it made me realise the book I had written didn't achieve the aim I set out for it. I'll confess I was nervous about the meeting, which started with me spotting a 50mm brass shell on the sideboard and him asking me the immortal question, 'So. What are you about, then?'

Ulp.

My serious and dedicated research in Belfast consisted mainly of getting hammered with the in-laws and staying in the lavish Merchant Hotel. If you're ever in Belfast, go for a few late night drinks at The Spaniard - the nearest thing to a Hamra bar I've ever encountered outside Hamra itself.

It's a bit like researching Shemlan by eating lazy afternoon mezze with friends - oh, this author's life! It was nice that an anti-internment march the next day plunged Belfast right back into 1990s timewarp, with armoured squad cars and water cannon on the street.

You have to find out all sorts of things. Cow diseases, train timetables, bullet impact velocities and the like. You wouldn't believe how hard it is to actually kill a cow if you're not using an RPG. The organisational chart of Tipperary police was one delightful evening's work. Ferry timetables, capacities and freight sailings get jumbled up with the colour of this police station wall or the reception layout of that hotel. Visiting locations (suspicious drive-by's of Banbridge nick) and checking facts, distances and even number plate series conventions all come into it.

And all because there's an Internet and somewhere in it is Nigel who knows the air speed of an African swallow. Unladen.

A Decent Bomber is available on pre-order from Amazon, iBooks and all good ebook outlets. It's also available in paperback from Amazon, Createspace or on order from your local bookstore.

Web Strategies For Authors

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Ugh. Even the title of this blog post makes me want to heave. But, like it or not, as a writer you're going to need to work out how you define yourself on The Tangled Web. Remember that one - when the marketing nongs who gave us 'the cloud' and 'the Internet of things' coin that as the next bigbig thing, you can all queue up to give me the credit for inventing it.

Suit: "We're defining the solutions that will make sense of TTW and simplify the muddle of the interconnectedness huddle."

Lesser mortal: "Sorry, TTW? What's that?"

Suit (smugly): "The Tangled Web. Duh."

Wow. I haven't said a thing yet and I've already managed to completely derail myself.

So. Authors. Websites. Basically, you're going to have to work out what you do about websites and the like. For myself, it was all nice and simple. When I published Olives - A Violent Romance, I started a blog of the book and a book website. At the time I worried a little about whether that was the right move, or whether I should have an Alexander McNabb site that had the books in it, but I was greedy for SEO, in part because Olives is such a pants title for a book (long story) and in part because it doesn't really matter what you do for a day job, you're too close to things when it's your own work.

The blog of the book was a clear content-led promotion play and launched in January 2012. I kept it going until around May 2013, by which time I was so exhausted by book promotion I could barely look at an Olive, let alone write about the blasted things. The blog was basically an ongoing discussion of the book's content, quoting bits of book and discussing the ideas, concepts and situations behind each quote. In total it's pulled about 24,000 page views and is still averaging a little under 400 views a month. That's not bad, really, but when you take McNabb's Law Of Clicks into account, it's not a very big hill of beans.

The book's website was nice and easy to do: I used Blogger as a CMS (Content Management System), because it's the Barney of CMSs (Wordpress is immeasurably more powerful, but complicated. Blogger is all primary colours and simple steps) and the introduction of multiple pages meant it was just fine for simple sites. I had a little help from +Derrick Pereira who knows more about the under the bonnet stuff than I do - other than that, it's simple enough for an averagely connected person. The website's pulled about 17,000 views since December 2011 when I launched it, which isn't actually much as it was the landing page for most of my Tweets and Facebook posts - but it's nice to have somewhere to send people to get more information on your book before you launch them at Amazon to close the deal.

The Beirut - An Explosive Thriller website launched a year later and has pulled about 14,000 views, while Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy has a measly 4,000 - a reflection on how increasing weariness has negatively impacted the amount of book promotion I've been doing, really. Perhaps interestingly, particularly as a test of the previously mentioned Law Of Clicks, Olives has seen 2,000 clicks on the 'buy Olives' page, Beirut has pulled a tad more (but possibly that's Lebanese politicians who thought someone else might be selling the city cheaper than they are) and Shemlan 1,000 clicks. Those clicks on the 'buy the book' pages have not translated into an equivalent number of book sales, believe me.

I decided on a simple common naming convention, olivesthebook.com and so on. Clearly I wasn't getting Olives.com or Beirut.com. And, of course, I put the address of each website into the books themselves, alongside alexandermcnabb.com.

Alexandermcnabb.com was originally just a redirect. I snaffled the domain (from whois.com, where I do all my web stuff) but didn't really get around to doing anything with it except redirect the URL to this here blog. After a while I bit the bullet and put up a simple, five-page site using Whois' Sitebuilder, which is a very simple to use but really quite powerful website template manager and CMS.

That 'strategy' has now run its course. I can't go on launching a new website for each book, apart from anything else it's costing me $9.98 a year in domain registration fees for each site. So over the weekend I pulled the primary content from each book website and put it all under alexandermcnabb.com, giving myself a 'proper' author website by taking Whois' 20 page package, rolling up my sleeves and structuring the site to be very book-centric. There are now six books up there (including the appallingly neglected, some would say justifiably, Space) and there's room to add more without increasing cost. The content is just as searchable as it was in the book sites and I'm not losing millions of links into those sites with the move.

If I could do it all again knowing what I know now (bear in mind that back in 2011 I had no idea I was going to go on to write and publish more books), I'd have gone straight for an author site with the books under its aegis. It simply makes more sense, introducing readers to other books I've written and giving a core property to link to. The Whois Sitebuilder product is actually pretty powerful and includes multimedia, social links and even a shopping cart if you're minded to go down that road.

I wouldn't have bothered with the Olives blog, either. I'd have abused this blog more and built links from it to alexandermcnabb.com rather than the Olives website.

If discussing all this has helped you to think through your own web presence as an author, I am glad. If it has bored you senseless, sorry about that but remember no refunds. If you want to pop over to my shiny new website, it's linked here for your listening pleasure. Please do remember to wipe your feet before you go in.

An Embarrassment Of Books

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It's not my fault I've ended up with two books. The Irish Farmer took a year to write, the newnew book has taken a tad over a month, having possessed me in the spirit of something Steven King would think up. I've been haunted by a book and it used me as an unwilling channel to create itself.

So now I'm in the odd position of having one book still being rejected by literary agents as I start to shop the second one around. Even beta readers haven't finished sending me their comments and feedback on the Irish Farmer. Some of the poor darlings have ended up with TWO of my books in their inboxes because they weren't fleet enough to get rid of the Irish one. I'm keenly aware my beta readers, kind enough to agree to being part of my book development process, are being soundly abused right now.

So now I have two unpublished manuscripts clamouring to become real books with titles and covers and Amazon pages and everything.

The question is what to do next. Assuming the result of sharing the newnew book with agents will be the usual round of smug, platitudinous form letters...

Sorry, but we're going to pass on this one. It's a tough market right now and we didn't feel enthusiastic enough about this to take it forward. However, this is a subjective business and others may feel differently, so don't be dispirited.

...I will then face self publishing two books, both set in the UK and so with limited appeal for a Middle Eastern audience. Do I print them as I did Olives and Beirut? Certainly, not printing a UAE edition of Shemlan had a major (negative) impact on the book's sales - but then I really don't have the time to go around chasing up bookshops and trying to chivvy up a charming but ultimately flaccid distribution chain. Doing that for the first two was exhausting.

And Shemlan didn't leave me out of pocket to the tune of a Dhs 15,000 print bill. Every copy of the book I've sold has been profit and while it all hardly amounts to a hill of beans, it seems to make more sense to be in the black than in the red. Call me old fashioned.

Fair enough, having sold out both books' print runs means I'm not technically out of pocket, but I'm hardly laughing all the way to the bank - and back at square zero anyway, because I'm certainly not about to order a reprint and start all over again. So if you want to buy Olives or Beirut today, you'll have to go online same as you do for Shemlan.

I tried to resist, honestly I did, but it's no use.

You can buy Olives - A Violent Romance here.

You can buy Beirut - An Explosive Thriller here.

You can buy Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy here.

I can order smaller runs from Createspace, getting them delivered here to the UAE for a little over Dhs30 per book. This means I can sell them to people at events and so on, but makes traditional distribution unworkable (the disty takes 50%). People here generally seem happy to buy a book that's in front of them but very averse to buying print books online. In fact the online habit, including ebooks, is pretty nascent around here.

But, for a self-published author, online makes so much sense it's not true. So the decision's pretty much a no-brainer: no big print runs, we'll be going with Amazon, iBooks, Createspace et al.

The next big question is timing. Giving agents another month to finish rejecting the Irish book takes us into July and Ramadan and Summer. And editing takes 4-6 weeks. So we're looking at October publication. Should I hold back on the newnew book and publish it to coincide with the LitFest in March next year? That would seem to make sense, but I can't for the life of me see how I can sit on a book for six months without bursting. Especially the newnew one, because I am very, very excited about it.

So I'm going to have to mull that one over. There are no easy answers. Any smart ideas gratefully received...

Books - A Journey

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This is all totally irrelevant to anyone, anywhere, ever, but I thought I'd take the chance to document some stuff now I've finished another book and have a little time before I can face editing it.

My first completed novel was a rather silly affair called Space, which I reckon I started back in 2001, but probably only really started in the spring of 2002. The oldest archive files I can find for the book only date back to 2003.

The oldest book files I have are actually a backup of an unfinished novel called Booze - those date back to September 2001, so I must have started Booze then put it to one side to work on the the less controversial Space.

When I'd finished Space and shopped it to agents, being rewarded with a remarkable tally of rejections (by the time I gave up, I had over a hundred), I started back on Booze, a rather scurrilous tale about a Kuwaiti buying a monastery that holds the recipe to an aqua vitae that tastes like angels' tears and is as addictive as crack cocaine. I began to get messages back from agents that said things like 'Humour doesn't sell dear boy' and so the work in progress that was Booze got shelved and, indeed, lies gathering dust even now.

I'll finish it one of these days, it was great fun. Let us remember that I still think Space is funny - it made me laugh enough, re-reading it after all these years, to put it up on Amazon for sale at a princely £0.99. Its first review on Amazon pointed out that "...it just isn't very funny."

It's linked here for your cheap Kindle read buying pleasure!

So I wandered off and decided to write a serious book. The result, Olives - A Violent Romance, was originally written in September 2004, pre-dating - I always thought rather presciently - the 2005 Amman bombing by a year. However, the bombing in the original manuscript was a dream sequence.

The original MS starts...

The first day of my new life started out in the dark, dreary sodium wetness of Heathrow Airport and ended in a cell. Let’s just say things didn’t go according to plan. Now, months later and looking back to the start of my time in Jordan, I wonder that I stayed there at all. Part of me bitterly regrets not leaving the second I was released. But there’s a tiny glimmer of hope in me that won’t go away, although now I’ve run out of choices and the consequences of my actions are written in the wreckage around me. 

And was considerably improved by the large amounts of editing and rewriting that went on between then and 2011 when it was finally published. Most of these took place post-2007, when I discovered Harper Collins' Authonomy and met other writers who taught me how to write better books, principally Australian Italian novelist Phillippa Fioretti. Other than that, the whole Authonomy experience was, as I have documented extensively in earlier blog posts, pretty pants.

Beirut - An Explosive Thriller was started in Autumn 2009 after the 'reader' for an agent called Eve White, who had requested a 'full read' of Olives had finally responded that it was all 'A bit too low key' for them. I was in a fury. The book's crammed with spies and bombs and shit and it's too low key?

That was it. The final straw. I was going to write a mad book and it was going to be based in Beirut. The first versions of Olives had Paul moving to Beirut, looked after by Gerald Lynch (who at that time was called Nigel Soames, a character who nagged at me because he wasn't 'working'), who felt guilty at the way things had panned out for the feckless young journalist. Beirut just made all sorts of sense as a location. I chucked Prague, Hamburg, Spain, Malta and the Greek Islands into the soup mixture just to be sure.

Work on Beirut - An Explosive Thriller actually started with 'The Muezzin Cried', a short story I posted here on the blog, derived, as usual, from a dream memory.

By December 2009 I had realised I was actually going to have to go back to Beirut if I was going to pull this one off. I had been travelling there since the '90s, but hadn't been back in a few years. I needed to refresh my memories and impressions of that sexiest of Eastern Mediterranean cities.

At the time, I had been involved in running a social un-event for online people in Dubai called GeekFest. I called a friend in Lebanon, Alex Tohme, and asked her if she'd be up for running GeekFest Beirut? Of course, she was totally up for it. And so I had my ticket to Beirut sorted!

On the 6th February 2009 GeekFest Beirut took place and I spent a few halcyon days striding around the city often in the company of old friend and partner in crime Eman Hussein. Thanks to GeekFest, I had 'my' city in the 'can'. I went back again for ArabNet with colleague and friend Maha Mahdy, discovering Barometre in the process thanks to geek and blogger Roba Al Assi. And again for GeekFest 3.0. And again, and again. The gorgeous Paul Mouawad Museum, the model for Michel Freij's own private museum, I discovered for myself.

It was with Maha that I went in search of Shemlan, the village nestled high in the Chouf that was home to the 'British Spy School' MECAS - The Middle East Centre for Arab Studies. I was to go back time and again, with the lovely Micheline Hazou and then also with friends Eman and Sara Refai. This village and an inspirational gentleman called Barry were to combine in the person of one Jason Hartmoor, the anti-hero of Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy.

Work on Shemlan actually started back in 2011 but was postponed because I decided to self-publish Olives and that took 110% of my time, back in November 2011. Beirut followed in September 2012.

By early 2013 - having visited Estonia, the location of the book's finale - I restarted work on Shemlan and it went like a rocket. I raced to the mad, climactic and rather unusual end of the book, propelled by death metal and much musical mayhem. I sent it off to my agent and when he responded, weeks later, that he wasn't even going to try shopping it to publishers, I terminated our relationship.

Boy, did that feel good.

Shemlan was published on 1 November 2013. I didn't publish a book in 2014, I spent the year wrestling with A Simple Irish Farmer and quite a lot of existential self publishing angst. Olives and Beirut have sold quite well, but Shemlan - easily the best of the three books - was plagued by the fact I didn't do a UAE print run and was too exhausted by the whole farrago of promotion to actually get out there and market the thing. Shemlan has been terribly - and unfairly - neglected as a consequence.

Seriously. I can't even look at a book blog now. If I see the words, 'I love books and...' one more time, I'll burn the puppy. Big brown eyes or no big brown eyes...

I've written a screenplay for Olives since. I just don't know what to do with that, so it's in a desk drawer. It was fun to do!

So here I am, fifteen years into my journey as a writer of books. I have one more book now finished, being steadily rejected by a number of agents. That's taken, as I have documented earlier, a year to write. And I have another new book to edit now, which took about a month to write. If traditional publishing turns both books down, as I confidently predict they will, I shall self publish them in September this year (A Simple Irish Farmer) and March next year (the newnew book) to coincide with the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature.

And after that, I reckon, I'll be hanging up my literary shoes...

Emirates LitFest Sell-Out Shock Horror!

I'm on a panel at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature on Friday with Orion Publishing Director Kate Mills and head of Norwich Writer's Centre Chris Gribble on 'How to make novels fly'.

It's not about taking Dorothy Parker's advice seriously* so much as creating books that people want to read. What is it that makes a book marketable, what's the 'secret sauce' that makes readers want to pick your work up and actually, you know, invest in it.

Sound interesting? Tough, bud - it's sold out.

For the first time, I'm also at the LitFest Murder Mystery Dinner vent on Friday evening, which I've never been to before. That's going to be funny, a table of unsuspecting rubes is going to be expecting someone famous and interesting and they're going to get me instead. Ha.

This, too, has sold out.

On Thursday evening, from 5pm-7pm, I'm doing a session on how to make a book - how to write one, edit one, find a publisher or DIY one. It's a sort of 'Shakespeare in 60 seconds' version of the three 2-hour workshops I usually take to cover these topics.

This, believe it or not, has also sold out.

However, it's not all bad news. I have complimentary tickets to the latter, so if you have great need and have been denied the seat you wanted to be raved at for two hours by a clearly unstable person, hit me up at @alexandermcnabb and we can arrange a ticket for you. 

It's going to be a busy end to the week. I got a radio interview Wednesday, a school appearance at Wesgreen School in Sharjah on Thursday (undoubtedly resulting in the usual scared kids and shocked faculty. Hey ho!) and I'm keynoting at Amman's Disrupt!/Books!/ workshop/conference/hackathon event Thursday evening too. 

I almost feel like a real author...

*"This is not a book to be tossed aside lightly, but thrown with great force."

How To Make Books

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

On the 5th March 2015, I'll be spending a couple of hours of my afternoon telling a small and bemused audience at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature how to make books in the UAE (or elsewhere, actually).

I'm intending to start with a blank piece of paper and end with a shiny, printed book full of lovingly sequenced words, something I have traditionally spent three two-hour sessions doing (How to write books; how to edit books and how to publish books respectively), so squeezing it all into one short blob of 120 minutes is going to be a laugh.

If your idea of fun is sitting with other worried people as a strange man cackles, gibbers profanity and strews the air with streams of disconnected and scabrous half-thought, you can book a place at the session right here. It costs Dhs200 per person which I hasten to add I don't get my hands on. I'm doing it for free: the LitFest keeps the lot. Like a sort of literary European Central Bank, they are...

So what do you get for your hard-earned cash?

For starters, we'll take a look at stories and why we want to tell and write them. We'll look at the structure of a story and why a story even needs a structure. We'll look at characters and locations and at how a combination of the two can be used to create scenes, which build towards chapters. Pretty soon we'll find we've written a whole book and then we'll take the covers off how you edit your own work to knock it, wriggling and squealing, into shape. 

Then we'll look at what you do with it next: seeking an agent and through them a conventional publisher or the alternative - the process of making books yourself in the UAE, from Kindle and iPad e-books through to printed booky books you can riffle through and smell the gutter to get that scent of a 'real book'. 

Of course, our journey will include the unique kinks and needs of publishing print and e-books in the UAE and Middle East,  where things quite often aren't quite what they seem. And then, when you've dragged your noses out of that there gutter, we'll look at book marketing in a short of Shakespeare in 60 seconds sort of way.

All in two hours. Gosh.

If you've been to one of my writing, editing and publishing workshops before, you're not likely to learn anything devastatingly new unless you missed out a session or two. If you have been a prior victim and you're after a refresher (and not a refund, remember: no refunds), this might be interesting. If you're new to this and think you might want to give it all a go, the session should be thought-provoking, fun, packed with ideas and useful to you.

Should. I said should.

5th March, 5-7pm at the Majlis room at the Intercontinental Festival City Conference Centre. You have to book, places are limited and, just to be clear, because I can't say this enough, there are no refunds. The link to the booking page is given above and also here for your clicking convenience.

I might try and make you buy my books at some stage in the proceedings. It's a sort of occupational hazard.

A Day In The Life

English: Ian Dury in concert. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Please note: this post is best read from the bottom up.

6.30pm
What happened?

Setting out to live blog a day when you're clearly in the poo for time and have a brand new Samsung which you don't know how to use and haven't yet downloaded key apps for was never going to be quite the breeze it appeared at 9am. Boy did I time out.
We had starters, mezze thingies and hot fatayer. I love mujaddara. Just saying.
Main course was a rich North African style lamb thingy with couscous and vegetables. I couldn't tell Rachel this for obvious reasons, principally the fact she had a cold shawarma at her side when I finally got back to her at 4.30 just as the ExpatWoman Festive Family Fun Fandango was shutting down for the day. She'd been too busy to eat lunch.
After the main course Lara got up and moderated. Liz talked. I talked. We answered questions from the audience. People bought books and asked us to sign them. I sold out of copies of Shemlan which was kind of nice.
For my part I talked about MECAS and Shemlan, the magic of Beirut and the shittiness of sectarianism, both in Beirut and in Northern Ireland, where my next book is set. And where Gerald Lynch the evil spy is more than comfortable because he understands the sectarianism that binds these two magical countries.

It was late in the afternoon as Gerald Lynch hopped along the uneven paving that lined Gouraud Street, the heart of Beirut’s bustling Gemayze area. He wore jeans and a leather jacket against the chill spring air, his hands in his pockets as he squeezed between the parked cars.
Gouraud’s bars, as ever, welcomed those who wanted to party and forget the woes of a world where violence and conflict were a distant memory but a constant worry. Orphaned by Belfast’s troubles, Lynch appreciated Beirut’s fragile peace and sectarian divides, the hot embers under the white ash on the surface of a fire that looked, to the casual observer, as if it had gone out. Lynch scowled as he passed a poster carrying Michel Freij’s smiling face, encircled in strong black script: ‘One Leader. One Lebanon.’

From 'Beirut - A Deadly Thriller'

So, what with eating lunch and all that talking, the afternoon flew by and I abandoned Rachel like the low cur I am. I rushed back to the Ranches, but it was too late. We had a chat about our respective afternoons and wandered our respective ways home. We're doing it again at Repton, but more about that later. I missed The Goat, but appreciated his kind gesture in leaving behind a security camera picture of him emptying my cash tin.
I finish by driving home, exhausted and elated. Raucous: Blur's Caramel, Kaiser Chiefs' In My Life, Chili Peppers' Californication.
It's very odd to spend a whole day rushing around talking to people about your books and then taking money from them. But it's one of the best ways of spending a day I know of.
So a heartfelt thank you to the ExpatWoman team for hosting the Author's Corner and to Jane Northcote and the team at Dubai World Trade Club - and Lara, the moderator with the mostest.
And now to a Djinn and Tonic...

1.10pm
Going in for lunch now. It's all glittering tines and starched white linen around here. Chattering, unsuspecting audience members are having drinks poured. I'm trying not to think of the blazing sun and poor old Rachel flogging books to the hordes. I'm dealing with it.

12.25pm
Oh wow. Placebo's Bulletproof Cupid and Foo Fighters Burn Away seeing me on the pell-mell dash from the Ranches to the Dubai World Trade Centre. Dury's Apples still haunting the edge of what passes for my mind. Got here on time, bit sweaty and over-excited but I'm good and the calm, monied halls of the World Trade Club are taking the edge off the Hunter Thompson vibe.
Rachel's got a wee stock of signed books and I actually feel sorry for her (now I've sold a tranche of books) in the sweltering heat while I loll around talking to the leisurely classes in the air conditioned luxury of Dubai's oldest members-only club.
It's going to be fun getting back to the Festive Fair, it was packed as I left, parking spaces only available out as far away as Studio City.
And now to lunch...

11.40am
I have to dash to Trade Centre now. Books have been flying out of the door, which is lovely. I've been teasing Rachel about how much more money I make per sale than she does and she's pointed out that she only has to write 35,000 words to finish one of hers.
I'm working out how to do for her. Seriously.

11am
Golly but it's hot. The sun's out, the smell of BBQs in the air and the crowds are out, people milling around and much chatter. The catering's a disaster, grinning staff who don't understand the words tea or sugar makes for an interesting service experience. Dhs 10 for an Aquafina, 18 for a coffee. Rachel's sold thousands of books, I haven't sold a thing. I hate her but have to be nice to her because she's looking after the stall at lunchtime. When I get back this afternoon I'm going to kill her and hide her body behind the clubhouse.

9.30am
Guy at the gate stops me. I announce I am an Expat Woman but he doesn't crack a smile. He tells me there are new rules and I can't have pets or feed the horses. That's fine, then.
I meet the team behind Eva Lilly and the Three Toed Snooch. They have t-shirts. Rachel has brought a big yellow pop-up stand with The Case Of The Exploding Loo on it.
I feel I am building well on my positioning as a serious author of Middle East spy thrillers.

9.15am
I'm on the road, having wiped out ADNOC's cash reserves by emptying their ATM and then buying a bottle of Masafi. They're going to go bust now but I've got a cash float and I don't care. Spiritualised's Broken Heart helps to erase Dury's Apples but it's going to take more than that. Feeder and System of a Down, Placebo and then Blur. That's done the trick. The MBZ road is clear and I'm flying along - I'd allowed an hour for the drive and I'm at the Ranches by 9.30.

9am

The idea of noting down the day comes to me. I've got Ian Dury's 'Apples' in my head and Sarah has just handed me a tin cashbox. It occurs to me that I'm actually going to handle money today. True to form, I've double booked myself. I'm selling and signing books at the ExpatWoman Festive Family Fun Fair AND I'm doing a literary lunch event at the Dubai World Trade Club. Kids' author Rachel Hamilton asked if she could pitch in a couple of weeks ago which was fine by me. And then I realised about the double booking thing, which made her my lunchtime stand-in. For two hours or so today she gets to be me and speak all gruff.

A Dubai Writer's Workshop - Book Writing, Editing And Publishing

The Brand Spanking New Bookshop at Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC)

STOP PRESS

Last session tonight - 28th October - at 6.30pm sharp! So far it's been busy but there have generally been enough seats/tabletops to go around. Tonight (more below) is about how to find a publisher or, alternatively, do it yourself!

So you think you might have a book in you and you want to let it out, a little like the icky scene in Alien. You know, that one. A book is born! Pop! Squelch!

Well, I might be able to help. Then again I might be of absolutely no use at all. It's one of those gambles you have to take in life.

On Tuesday 14th, 21st and 28th October 2014 respectively, from 6.30pm until 8.30pm, I'll be running a series of workshops at Bookshop - the funky new book sales outlet in DIFC from those lovely (if perhaps just a little potty) people at BrownBook.

We did a vaguely similar series of workshops at Archive early last year at which people appeared to have fun, but then they were maybe just being polite... And if you miss this lot, you can pay good money to come along to the writing and publishing workshop I'll be holding at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature next year.

But these ones are... shhh... free!

How to Write a Book

Tuesday 14th October
Bookshop Dubai (DIFC) 6.30pm

I've written blog posts on this very topic if you want to mug up or just avoid having to spend two hours glued to a seat with me screaming abuse at you. At the actual workshop, we're going to look at the history, nature and purpose of narrative, and then delve into what makes people write books, how you can save time by thinking through some key stuff beforehand, structures of narrative and why you need to mull six honest serving men before you ever tap a key. Then we'll be lurching into how to structure your book and tell your story in the most compelling and exciting way. We'll look at nasty stuff like POV and characterisation before we zoom into writing techniques to help you make the most out of your story, including stuff like crafting dialogue and building brilliant exposition that flies rather than plods. If you survive that lot, you might make it on to...

How to Edit a Book

Tuesday 21st October
Bookshop Dubai (DIFC) 6.30pm

Editing is a vital skill for any writer, not least because the less work your editor has to do on correcting your sloppy manuscript, the more quality of thought and deed you'll get from the edit. Trust me. We'll be looking at the power of words, at the importance of word choice in various situations and then getting all down and dirty with different types of edit, from the big picture right the way down to the line edit, where all those commas are left quailing in the dark corner of a dank cellar as you wave a shotgun at them. We'll review techniques for creating a synopsis and a book blurb before wandering around the (huge) range of common writing errors you can purge from your work before anyone else gets a chance to see 'em. And then it's on to...

How to Publish a Book

Tuesday 28th October
Bookshop Dubai (DIFC) 6.30pm

We're going to take a look at your two most likely routes to publication: traditional publishing (finding an agent and a publisher who want to invest in your work) and self publishing (finding an audience who might want to buy and read your book). We'll look at how to prepare your manuscript for both eventualities, the process of publishing - from how to construct query letters through to how to find your audience online. We'll look at appointing an editor, getting an ISBN, printing, creating ebooks and all sorts of other stuff, including online book sales platforms and how you can promote yourself as an author - whether you're traditionally published or self published.

Who the hell am I to be doing this?

Nobody, really. I'm a publishing, digital media and communications consultant by day. By night, I'm the self-published author of three Middle East-based spy thriller novels: Olives - A Violent Romance which caused quite a controversial kerfuffle; Beirut - An Explosive Thriller which landed me a literary agent in London whom I finally dumped and Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy, a novel I'm deeply proud of, but which has so far left the bestseller lists untroubled. I'm currently working on my fourth serious novel, A Simple Irish Farmer. Like I say, yer takes yer risks...


If you'd like to come along - or have a friend who's interested in writing and thinks they might just have a book in them, there's no money or registration or anything involved - but if you'd like a seat, I'd suggest you RSVP by leaving a comment on the blog, hitting me up on Twitter (@alexandermcnabb), facebook (/alexandermcnabb), using the contact form on alexandermcnabb.com or emailing me at alexander@alexandermcnabb.com. I'm sort of easilyreachable...

For location and so on, you can hit up Bookshop here.

I'm also at the excellent ExpatWoman Family Fair on November 8th AND co-hosting a 'Literary Lunch' at Dubai World Trade Centre on the same day. I am clearly in the process of cloning myself...

Tata for now!

Stalled. A Writer's Nightmare.

I've stalled on the new book. I've written not one word since before the Summer hols. I made some notes and stuff in Belfast and Newry, I sat down for a long chat with a 'Shinner' MP and former IRA man while I was in 'Noori', that fine town in 'Norn Iron', an engagement organised by my lovely Sister in Law and fascinating in so many ways. But I haven't actually been, you know, writing.

'So you served 15 years of a 27 year sentence in Long Kesh. The Maze.'
'That's right.'
'The H Blocks.'
'No, before them. It was Nissen huts, then, segregated on sectarian lines. We used to pass notes across each others' huts. So even the Unionists would pass our notes, and we would pass theirs.'
'Did you get time off for good behaviour?'
'I doubt it. We burned the prison down.'

It's not 'writer's block', that's something different altogether. It's a bit like work on Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy, which was stalled by my decision to publish Olives and Beirut myself. While all that went on, poor old Shemlan took a back seat, unfinished at around the halfway mark. But I went on going to Beirut and visiting the village, the Mountain and other locations in the book. I just didn't write anything.

When I finally sat down to finish Shemlan, jacked into volume 11 death metal and Estonian plain chant, it flew like a jet-propelled Teflon coated flying thing in a vacuum. Hang on, how do things fly in a vacuum if there's no pressure of air or gravity or other opposing force? Help!

So I'm not really angsting about the lack of progress. Things happen in their time and this one obviously needs to 'bed down' a bit before I go on. I trust my instincts well enough by now not to try and keep pushing if my head won't be pushed. The novel's at a crossroads and I need to go back over it, test it against the stuff in my head and correct it before starting construction work again.

I'll know when I'm ready. Life's busy, there's so much going on, distractions are flying like Teflon coated flying things gravitating towards a large body.

In the meantime, any time I get a few moments to sit down to write, I'm ending up scribbling blog posts instead. The paucity of such posts testifies to the lack of time in general.

Where does it all go?

Book Review: Beyond Dubai: Seeking Lost Cities In The Emirates

"Dubai has nothing. No culture, no history, no character. It has no heart, no spirit, no traditions... It's not a real city, it's just a mirage, all spin and no substance, a city built on sand."

This book starts on that statement and then sets out to prove it wrong. Its triumph is that it does just that and it's a read anyone setting out to explore the Emirates will enjoy.

David Millar lived and worked in the UAE and decided to write a book about the place. He's by no means the only one, we have a small but growing coterie of books left behind by expats like animal spoor, from Desperate Dubai Diaries through to Glittering City Wonders.

I usually avoid these books on the grounds they will almost invariably irritate me. I've spent the past 26-odd years travelling to and living in the Emirates and I've seen enough of it with my own eyes to know I'm not particularly interested in seeing it through someone else's. Having said which, Jim Krane's Dubai: The Story of the World's Fastest City is the Dubai book.

David's taken a different tack, however. Unlike so many commentators on the Emirates, he's decided that below the surface - the half inch of champagne - is a more interesting place to be. Employing the charming little conceit that his visiting girlfriend, Freya, is mulling whether to come to the UAE to join him but won't live somewhere without history, David looks beneath the vavavoom and wawawoo of Dubai and explores the history of the place in a series of road trips. We go up to the East Coast, taking in Fujeirah, Kalba, Northern Oman and the Wadi Bih track; we snake around the fjords of Kasab and the concrete-crushing sprawl of Ras Al Khaimah and we generally do Al Ain, the Rub Al Khali, the Liwa crescent and, finally, Sir Bani Yas.

Each of the book's destinations is treated as a trip to the modern location but the object of the excursion is to unearth its history, the lost cities of the UAE. And David, clearly relishing his subject, mixes observations of the modern and ancient aplenty.

Let me be honest. I fully expected to hate the whole thing. There were times when I felt the discomfort of someone else's view of the place I live in. Having yourself discovered a thing, it's hard to feel a vicarious thrill on behalf of someone else discovering a thing. This is why running up to me and babbling excitedly that whales have belly buttons cutteth not the mustard. Reading Beyond Dubai, I had to fight quite a bit to stop being a dog in the manger all the time and yet - once I'd settled down - I found myself enjoying the journey. Given I have lived here for donkey's, spent quite a lot of time working as a features writer (and so been paid to unearth stuff and write about it) and generally made something of a habit of travelling around and poking things to see if they squeak, there was much in the book I already knew or had experienced myself. Having said that, I've taken a damn sight longer to do it than it takes to read a book: David's efforts have by no means been in vain.

This is a book that will appeal hugely to expats in the UAE or holiday makers interested in going beyond the beaches and taking a look at the rich heritage and culture the country has to offer. If you think that very statement sounds odd, then you need to buy this book. Beyond Dubai is a well written book, a light read that makes its subject accessible and enjoyable. It's sort of Bill Bryson meets Leonard Woolley.

From Jumeirah to Umm Al Qawain's millenia-old city of Tell Abraq, from RAK's lost Julphar and Ibn Majid the famous navigator (whose art eclipsed that of the Europeans whose navies were only then beginning to explore the world systematically while the Arabs had long mastered the arts of astronomy and navigation), Beyond Dubai takes us to the Emirates behind the new roads and skyscrapers and often does so with wit and charm. Brio, even.

Don't get me wrong - I has my quibbles, I does. For a start the big plane parked up in Umm Al Qawain's airstrip isn't a 'bomber', it's an IL76 - a commercial freighter. It hasn't been there since the fifties, either - it was landed in the nineties. I didn't like the reference to the Jumeirah Mosque as the only one in Dubai that welcomes 'infidels', but then that's just me. Jazirat Al Hamra was not abandoned because its inhabitants were lured to Abu Dhabi's oil industry, they fell out with the ruler of RAK and Sheikh Zayed offered them resettlement. Wahhabis are Sunnis, so you can't be 'Wahhabi rather than Sunni'. The drive through Wadi Bih is glorious, majestic and great fun, I'm not sure quite why he makes such a fuss about how hard and precipitous a mission it was. It was always a pleasant day trip and a doddle of a drive (it's closed now, tragically). Strangely, for a couple so interested in finding the history of the place, David and Freya don't visit the many museums strewn around the Emirates. There's no mention of the megalithic tomb or fort at Bitnah, a vital ancient trade route through the mountains to the East Coast (originally the only passage through the mountains) and, indeed, a number of other sites. And so on.

But you get the point here - I'm caviling because I Think I Know Better and that sucks as an attitude when reading a book like this. And yes, I accept that Mr ITIKB is likely just fooling himself much of, if not all of, the time. The point is, anyone with less 'I was here when it was all sand' issues and an interest in the wider UAE will enjoy this book and I reckon will profit greatly from it. And yes, I learned things from this book, so I'm not quite as omniscient as I'd like to think.

If you've just arrived in the Emirates, want to live or holiday there or want to scratch around below the surface a little, Beyond Dubai will give you much pleasure.

I was provided a copy of the book by the author (whom I do not know personally and who approached me seeking a review). You can buy your own copy right here and if you've got a Kindle, you'll only be parting with £2.95!

Book Review: The Paris Trap

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Joseph Hone is a spy novelist who made something of a splash in the 1970s but whose star was eclipsed by the likes of John Le Carré. Hone's books have been re-released as 'Faber Finds', including Kindle editions which are, for the back list of a 1970s author, massively over-priced at £5.99.

I bought The Paris Trap because of a recommendation on Twitter - as I buy so many of my books now. And I got a fascinating book for my money. Author Jeremy Duns, introduced by uber-geek Gerald Donovan, shared the first page of the book on Twitter and the text leaped off the page at me. Set in Riyadh, it clearly was going to be an extraordinary read. In fact, the introduction to the Faber Finds edition is by Jeremy, who says he regards Hone as 'One of the great spy novelists of the twentieth century.'

All well and good - but what I didn't realise was quite how extraordinary a read this was to turn out to be.

For a start, Hone was writing in a simpler time. So his editors didn't stop him doing all the things editors throw their hands up at today, from lazy adverbs and clear 'writer's kinks' (he constantly uses 'some' in similes as in 'some great bird' and - actually - constantly uses similes that would give Dan Brown a run for their daftness money) through to sillinesses such as "I tried to remember what the label reminded me of. And then I remembered."

Suddenly, I realised, Faber, for your £5.99, certainly weren't prepared to edit this baby. The text was merely jammed into a file converter, unloved and unread (presumably), leaving us with classics such as "I couldn't avoid an unpleasant sneer oranger."

Of anger. They meant of anger. Similarly "autumntinted" and "attaché casefor a file" and others such as word repetitions - silly 'literals' that shouldn't be in a text from a major publisher. And certainly not for - you may have got the feeling I have an issue with this and you may just be right - £5.99.

Whether this lack of editing is what left idiocies such as "a tactful after-shave lotion" in the MS we may never know. Let alone "the sugary orchestra"...

So what about the plot, the premise, the big idea? Bear with me here, it gets a bit involved. Super-spy Harry Tyson used to write TV scripts and had created a successful series called 'Hero' before joining British Intelligence as a real life spy. Hero is to be made into a feature film starring blue-eyed hearthrob Jim Hackett. Terrorists sympathetic to the Palestinian cause kidnap Harry's girlfriend Katy and Susie, his daughter by estranged wife Sarah in an attempt to coerce Harry into rewriting the screenplay of the film to make it more sympathetic to their cause. We've barely even started here and I'm already drooling and banging my head gently against the laptop keyboard. I also can't shake Jim Hacker from Yes, Prime Minister. I know it's wrong, but it's in my head like a Bony M single and I can't get it out.

Jim Hackett, an old friend of Harry and Sarah's, is estranged from wife Katy - Harry's girlfriend, although Jim and Susan don't know it. They, meanwhile, are sleeping together. Enter the French police, who are brutal, stupid and great at getting shot at. There's a French film maker called Belvoir and a French copper called Brion. With Sarahs and Susans, Belvoirs and Brions I'm already getting confused and that's without adding Anna Kalina the dumpy terrorist intellectual with a habit of wearing baggy jumpers and yet who has a gorgeous face. This makes her a Lesbian, apparently. I'd have thought dungarees would have done, but who am I to cavil at a chap's characterisations?

Anna has kidnapped Katy and Susan and is hiding them in a hole in the ground where she likes to drink Hine cognac and kiss people. She kisses Harry before sending him out into the world to rewrite his script and shoot Hero while his woman and daughter are held by terrorists in a bunker. His woman, Katy (previously Jim Hacker's smacker) is of Russian noble extraction (sorry, Hackett) and yet doesn't know much about Napoleon beyond Empire Line Dresses. She is a dress designer. I might have forgotten to mention that. At one stage, while she is being held by terrorists in a bunker, Jim and Harry work on the launch of her new collection which they aren't going to let a simple kidnapping disrupt. It all gets pretty messy, to tell the truth.

Harry's daughter, a pebble-glassed schoolgirl, is fascinated by Napoleon and so she and Katy set to in their new bunker home, making a Napoleonic puppet theatre. If only Terry Waite or John McCarthy had thought of this, the years would have simply flown by for them. 

Katy, by the way, buys Harry a present of a 'sweetly pornographic peepshow'. Before she is kidnapped, clearly. The market for sweetly pornographic peepshows in terrorist bunker hideouts being - as far as I am aware and you can please feel entirely free to correct me here - limited. 

We are reminded of this sweetly pornographic peepshow many times for some reason. Perhaps because Katy turns out to be a lesbian, too, eventually suddenly realising in a single moment of Anna's animal magnetism that she doesn't like boys and sex hurts her. If sex hurts you, you are clearly lesbian. And vice versa. Hope that clears up things for any of you gels out there feeling a little confused about things. Go get yourself a baggy jumper see if you feel any the better for it.

There is much in the novel that doesn't belong in a novel. For instance: "The Inspector stood up, walked over to the top of a filing cabinet, put the top back on a thermos of coffee and adjusted his shirt and tie in a little mirror on the wall behind. Then he blew his nose and settled his moustache."

Right. 

BTW, Thermos is a proper noun and so gets a capital T, Faber.

Simile. Often odd if not a wee bit looney. "Striding around the first-floor salon like a minor prophet" had me wondering how minor prophets stride, while a warring couple "returned to the fray like sleep walkers". 

If you really want to go to town, try "I took in the two absorbed figures beneath the arched ceiling, set against the white-washed background, in a moment - as in a picture: this suddenly proffered domestic interior, like the vision of a room seen while walking down a foreign village street at midday: an old man shaving from a bucket, or a woman turning a mattress - the work of other people's worlds, which we may share intimately for a moment, before losing it all in the next step we take down the street going back to our hotel."

I mean, whaaaaat? The shouty man's scaring me, mummy...

There are many Wisdoms: strange descents into claptrap and odd gobbets of tossed-in half-thought that draw the reader up and leave the questing mind wandering around, clutching at imaginary butterflies in search of anything that might be justification for the latest surreal assertion: "Children can remain the same for months on end and then suddenly change overnight." and, later on, "She wanted to surprise herself - not be the surprise."

Put the gun down, dude. Step back slowly.

There are issues of POV (or Point of View) throughout. I wouldn't usually bring this up as I think POV quibbles are the territory inhabited by Word Nazis, but they genuinely interfere with the flow in this book. The whole mixes Harry's first person POV chapters with third person chapters, but then we also flip-flop between the two and Harry has a nasty habit of knowing what everyone else is thinking. Show not tell, my editor would be screaming and I'd have to hit the cur hard to shut him up. "Katy, I could see, was conjuring up that lost world of sleigh-bells and privilege and sensibility even as she spoke - as a person will plan future holidays to take his mind off a serious illness which he comes to forget, poring over time-tables and sunny brochures."

Harry's a mind reader, although he would appear to be dyslexic.

There's a whole scene featuring Alain Belvoir the film maker and his old parents or someone like that. It features a loving portrait of an old lady called Chummy who has flaking skin and shitty ducks. I do not know for the life of me why any editor would have left it in the book.

The dialogue is generally a horse's arse, too. "Brion was tired: he could only speak in clichés." had me laughing precisely because that's what Brion had been doing all along. And everyone else, for that matter. Later on Harry puts his finger on the very button. "Sometimes," He opines, "it all gets too stupid."

Reluctantly I have to stop, although there's a lot more. I had started making notes in my Kindle text, something I rarely, if ever, do unless I'm working on an edit or my or someone else's work. I like to enjoy books I'm reading, not pick them apart. But I couldn't help myself, simply because there's just so much in here you can't read fluidly or without being brought up time and time again by the flubs and bumps. To channel Hone, it was like a turbulent flight peppered with constant changes at foreign terminals like a series of interruptions that reminds one of the workings of complex roundabout systems such as those found in city centres that have a concatenation of major routes like some long piece of Italian pasta.

Don't get me wrong - don't think I disliked this book, because I didn't. I enjoyed it immensely. But for the wrong reasons, I suspect. This book is a text book raw MS for editors to practice on. It contains every quirk, error, oddity and clunk you'd want to demonstrate every aspect of good book editing for the modern self-editing author or professional editor. It's a classic 'before' manuscript that fails to tell its story well because of its legion flaws - including the fact the basic story premise itself is as stupid as a pair of gin-pissed March hares who've got their paws on an inexhaustible supply of Amyl Nitrate soaked carrots.

Of Gaza And Telegenically Dead Palestinians

(Photo credit: AlphaBetaUnlimited)

I have long been struck by how little people back home knew - or cared - about the situation in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Advancing that understanding was a big part of my intent in writing Olives - A Violent Romance, which has a go at perhaps deepening a reader's understanding that the situation behind those nice, easy to understand CNN or Fox bumper sticker headlines is perhaps all a little more nuanced than 'Palestinians are all terrorists and the good guys are trying their best to sort out a nasty and difficult situation that's not of their making'.

I got an email yesterday from an American reader who said she was thinking about what was going on in Gaza right now all the more deeply because she'd read Olives. It was sort of nice to get and I know there are many others out there who feel the same way, so that all sort of makes the book worth the effort (without the millions, fame, fortune and all the rest it's clearly brought me).

And yet I still feel utterly impotent when confronted with the realities on the ground. I sat looking at Twitter last night trying to contain the surge of anger, trying to retain some sense of objectivity and not just fall off the deep end. I follow a lot of 'activists' and others involved in Palestine on Twitter and so my feed is rarely free of a clamorous little group whose intentions are of the finest, but whose constant barrage of one-sided opinion can be counter-productive. It gets wearing - you just don't want to hear it any more.

Watching the demolition of Gaza's infrastructure, the sight of F16s, precision guided artillery, helicopter gunships and now tanks, warthogs and troops battering one of the world's most densely populated - poorest and most desperate - cities was awful. It's beyond cynical - Benjamin Netanyahu's exploitation of Hamas' pathetic rocket attacks would only be possible in a country that has been consistently radicalised by the constant propaganda pushed by a polity with a wholly evangelical Zionist agenda.

Could you even contemplate a Western politician responding to international outrage at the unacceptable civilian cost of his government's military might being hurled at a defenceless city with the charge that the other side was 'piling up telegenically dead Palestinians'? They're pulling lifeless, dusty little bodies out of the rubble every minute - over 300 innocents are dead already in this latest incursion. And Israel's leader demonstrates his regret by accusing the children his military have murdered of being telegenic? God help us all.

Those impressive sounding Hamas rocket attacks have not killed a single Israeli. There are no Israeli children being pulled out of the rubble. In return for which Israel is pounding densely packed population centres with all the might of a modern military machine, blasting away at the rats slithering around in the dustbin of Gaza. They've got nowhere to go: north, east, west, south. They're all 'legitimate targets' as the Israelis mendaciously blether about ceasefires and continue to send high explosives, flechettes and fragmentation warheads into homes, hospitals and schools.

And so sitting in my comfy chair in Sharjah, I watch it and the only thing I can do is get the hell off Twitter before I lose it completely and become yet another skewed, furious voice railing against the monstrous unfairness of what they're doing, the awful media reporting (TWO ISRAELI DEAD screamed one bold type headline, only underneath did we see that some three hundred Palestinians had chosen to run into explosives) and my own complete impotence.

I didn't even want to write this, just let my book stand as my effort and comfort myself that if only a few people are watching all this and thinking about it more because of what I've done, then that's a good thing. But, of course, I'm kidding myself. A stupid book won't change one iota of what's happening. Nothing I could possibly do will.

So I went upstairs and watched it all on Sky. At least then I was just shouting at a television and not constantly restraining myself from flinging abuse at people tweeting recipes for butterfly cakes just because I care about this and they've chosen to prioritise how much butter makes the sponge as light as an angel's kiss.

Book Post - Promotion And All That

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I've just been working on slidesets for next week's series of workshops on how to write, edit and publish books. In the last of the three, I look at getting an agent and also self publishing. And that invariably leads to the knotty issue of book promotion.

It's something of a conundrum, this promotion thing. I threw myself into promoting Olives - A Violent Romance like a particularly relentless lunatic, taking every opportunity to make a fuss, create content, repurpose, share, link and generally hoon around. Given the day job, I had a relatively good go at using my platforms and reach to nag, annoy, bully and generally beseech anyone who had ever come within my relatively wide ambit.

I did interviews, LitFests and ran a very extensive online reviews and outreach campaign. I published the book in October and by the following June was so exhausted with the whole thing I never wanted to see another book blogger again. Ever. Even the words 'I love books' used to bring me out in a cold sweat.

Picking up the energy to promote Beirut - An Explosive Thriller was a big deal. I never really managed it that well, beyond a cool launch event and some interviews/workshops and other stuff. I simply didn't have the energy left. And one thing that was becoming clear was there was a law of diminishing returns at play here - social media wasn't having the same impact it used to.

Everyone talks about getting an 'author platform', but what happens when those outlets become jammed with authors abusing their platform to promote books? Or when that platform is no longer seen as crucial or important to the people using it? What if everyone's just, you know, moved on?

I really haven't promoted Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy that much. IMHO it is by far the best of the three books but hasn't even drawn ten Amazon reviews. Because I haven't printed an edition in the UAE as I did for the last two books, it's not being bought by its 'core audience' in the main because Amazon doesn't serve the UAE, the adoption of e-readers is generally miles behind in the Middle East and few people seem to be buying books online.

Book bloggers, who used to be relatively accessible, have TBR (to be read) lists stretching ahead months. A lot of book blogs have just ground to a halt, are no longer accepting self published books or simply aren't taking on more reviews. It's getting harder and harder to get your voice out there and have it heard.

And when you do, McNabb's law applies. You have to kiss an awful lot of frogs to get one buyer. And even then, they probably won't read the damn thing for months.

It's starting to get problematic. There HAS to be better way to get good books into people's hands (and no, it's not blasted GoodReads) than this trilling and primping on social media - because that's simply not working.

If you know the answer, clearly I am more than interested in your views. Because I, for one, don't...