Children of the Seven Sands. Who's a little smartie?

So this is the cover of Children of the Seven Sands and I think (I could perhaps be accused of being ever so slightly biased) it's a little beauty.

So here's a big thank you to the elves and dwarves at Motivate Mansions, who sweated over making the book all really rather jolly.

The book's edited to death, although something horrible's sure to have slipped by. You've got 140,000 words to get right. The picture captions are done. It's all ready to rock and roll, basically. The cover's the last element to be settled.

And now it's just a waiting game as the NMC does its thing. Time to ponder how the hell I ended up writing a history of the Emirates in the first place, how I decided to plunge into non-fiction having had a perfectly pleasant time of it writing novels. I try not to remember the research, the tottering piles of academic papers and esoteric volumes. The cross-checking facts and all that stuff.

The acid test is around the corner now - Joe Public. Will it be enough of a narrative to be readable? Will it deliver on its promise of making the UAE's often bloody but never less than fascinating history come alive? Or will it trudge and heave, limping its way to being bookshelved halfway through?

I could care less right now. I'm sitting gazing at the cover and rolling the title around in my mouth like warm brandy.

Yessss....

Ed-Dur and the Mysteries of the Ancient World

The site of Ed-Dur. Nothing to see here, folks. Move on, move on...

In the heady days of the building boom, back in the early 'noughties', Dubai property company Emaar started developing the coastal area north of Umm Al Quwain, flattening a great swathe of land and building a posh little sales centre on a curve in the road north to Ras Al Khaimah. It had magnificent views out over the mangroves. Across the road was a ramshackle cold store and a tiny mosque. The place is called Al Dour.

The scheme came to little in the end. The building boom turned into a bust and only a couple of hundred houses were actually constructed. They're still there today, a tiny gated community at the end of a wee drive from the main road, hoarding blocking the views either side of you (it always reminds me of the final scenes from Terry Gilliam's surreal and brilliant Brazil) until you emerge into a small carbon copy of Arabian Ranches.

Off the main road connecting these little beige 'dare to dream' wonders and the sales centre, to the right uphill just before you hit the curve as the road snakes past the mangroves to your left, you'll find a little brown sign to the 'Ed-Dur Archaeological Site'. If you drive on the sandy track up there, you'll find yourself looking at a expanse of shrubby desert fenced off from prying eyes and, behind the fence, a few clapboard buildings that look like a tatty little labour camp.

I'd not recommend this one as a day trip, because you'll see no more than I have just described.

And yet beyond that fence lies one of the most remarkable and mysterious sites in the UAE - an early Pre-Islamic city sprawled across some 800 hectares. Blossoming from the 3rd Century BCE onwards, Ed-Dur is closely linked with Mleiha inland - the two settlements are joined by the great wadi that snakes inland from here through the oasis towns of Falaj Al Mualla and Dhaid. Coins found here at Ed-Dur were minted using coin moulds found at Mleiha, animal burials at the two cities follow a similar rite - while human burials speak of rituals associated with Parthian northern Iraq.

Part of the excavated temple complex at Ed-Dur, slowly being washed away...

Ed-Dur was a significant city with links to India, Persia, Mesopotamia, the Levant and Yemen. It was home to a vast variety of mudbrick and other constructions, from fortifications to houses and temples. It is here that we see alabaster sheets used as glass in windows and it is here that we find ceramics from Mesopotamia, Iran and India as well as Roman glass, all dated to the 1st Century BCE. The temple complex unearthed here contained an Aramaic inscription, one of the earliest finds of writing we have from the area (the others are, of course, from Mleiha), thought to have been the name of an early sun god, Shams (Himyarite) or Shamash (Akkadian).

Ed-Dur has been put forward as Pliny’s Omana, ‘a harbour of great importance in Carmania’. Carmania was a Persian province under Alexander the Great which stretched along the coast from Bandar Lengeh to Bandar Jask. Alexander never quite managed to invade Arabia, despite having expressed a clear interest in doing just that - sending his Admiral, Nearchos, to explore the seas from India to Basra. Nearchos never made landfall on the Arabian side of the Gulf and Alexander died before he could add southeastern Arabia to his list of conquests.

Ed-Dur still has many secrets to tell us. Hellenistic era coins found here celebrate 'Abiel', although we have no idea who Abiel was - similar coins have been found in hoards in Bahrain but in a location dating them to some 300 years before the coins at Ed-Dur. These 'Tetra Drachma' were the coins minted at Mleiha - Abiel seems to have lived on in coinage for a great deal longer than in life.

Hellenistic Tetra Drachma found at Ed-Dur

Both Mleiha and Ed-Dur seem to have declined in the first two centuries of what we now call the 'Common Era' and then they likely fell to the invasion of the Sasanians. Ed-Dur was never to recover and provided archaeologists with a remarkable trove of finds (some of which you'll find on display at Umm Al Quwain's eclectic and pleasant little museum). Changes in sea levels and the silting of the coast here have meant that the maritime centre and former port of Ed-Dur is today a good few hundred metres from the sea it used to serve.

Today, the excavated temple and other buildings stand scandalously exposed to the elements, literally washing away with every rainy season that lashes the site. Unprotected and neglected, the entire area of Ed-Dur (imagine an archaeological centre like Mleiha established here - what a marvel!) is fenced off, a sad testament to the overlooked heritage of the Emirates.

So next time you're hoying off to the Barracuda, look out for the brown sign before the corner by the sales centre and spare a thought for the still-hidden mysteries of the ancient city of Ed-Dur...

Children of the Seven Sands

Well, this is a first. It's only been eighteen years since I first sent a book to a literary agent (almost to the day, funnily enough), resulting in the first of something like 300 rejections I was to pick up as time went by. I hasten to add this has in no way diminished my joy at writing my six novels (one silly, five serious) or in my interactions with the very many readers who have enjoyed them. And even the one or two who have felt the need to protest them!

And now we have my very first ever publishing contract. And the devil of it is, this book's non-fiction!

More anon...

Dubai, the Good Old Days and Sundry Confessions

Okay, it's a fair cop, I'll come quietly. It was me. I done the blag.

We had a bit of a clearout yesterday - chucking out bags of that cruft that seems to assemble around life: old user manuals, bits of laptops that had long been consigned to the inexplicably green 'general waste' Bee'ah dumpster outside our villa. The blue one is meant for recyclable waste, which is a novel idea to implement in a place where there is absolutely zero awareness of recycling, let alone which materials are recyclable (actually depressingly few plastics are actually recyclable) and which are not.

I digress.

We found, as usual when you do this sort of thing, some old treasures. My pair of 1995 'Emirates Internet' 3.5" floppy disks, for instance. Eudora and Netscape Navigator, anyone? The edition of Paris Match featuring an interview with British Expat Alexander McNabb hanging out at the luxurious boutique Park Hyatt hotel, which got me into trouble with France Telecom, with whom I was working in Jordan at the time. "We are paying you too much!", their outraged CEO bellowed at me when we met. He'd read the magazine on the plane over. Oops.

But I digress.

The Internet in just two disks! Marvellous!

One of the things we unearthed was a tatty manila file. And inside it was evidence of My Great Crime, perpetuated the very year those two disks were first clutched in my sweaty hand as I danced out of Etisalat's Sharjah HQ with my Emirates Internet subscription confirmed.

You see, I am - was - TE Chapman.

Not unnaturally, you will be puzzled. That is likely because you won't recall the Emirates in pre-Internet days, when the Gulf News letters page was the nearest thing to a forum or chat room, Facebook or Twitter, you could get. It was all very charming. You'd fax (fax, eh?) your letter in and the next day it would be printed. Then the day after, you'd get a reaction to it. Quaint, no?

The pastime of writing stupid letters to Gulf News was popular before we had electrons to play with. The trick was to write something so blindingly stupid that only a drooling idiot would fail to realise that nipples were being tweaked and toes pulled. But to pitch it just right, so that the letters page editor would let it pass. It was a skill I was to hone over the weeks and months.

I recall one particularly mad thread developed around the issue of plant pots on apartment balconies. One prominent expat got away for weeks with a correspondence based on his keen interest in scatology and wondering if there were any other like minded scatologists interested in grouping together to found a society. It was a common thing to find, expats writing in to say they were interested in Scottish history from 1814-1826 and wondered if there were etc etc. It was, literally, weeks before the GN letters editor was apprised that scatology is the study of faeces and the correspondence abruptly closed.

We had more time back then, alright?

Anyway, I digress.

Many of the contributors to the GN Letters Page back in the day were (arguably) unduly concerned with British imperialism, colonialism and any other ism you care to name. It seemed to be the work of just a few seconds to conceive a character who would be a rabid colonialist and set about baiting various hapless victims who had otherwise been passionate about exposing the evils of orientalism and the like.

TE Chapman was actually one of the various names adopted by arch colonialist, hero figure and shortarse Thomas Edward 'TE' Lawrence (Ronald Storrs, the British governor of Mandate Palestine, referred to him as 'Little Lawrence') AKA Lawrence of Arabia. See what I did there?

For quite a while, the GN letters page lit up with fiery denunciation and towering polemic. Chapman incited controversy and thundered away, enraging his audience with joyful consistency until, one day, a foolish young colleague 'outed' him as a nom de plume and Chapman's career was brought to an abrupt end.

They're all in that file. Yellowed, stuck to the daily faxes that went off to GN, a record of my undoubted glee at being quite so successful in being a right royal pain in the butt to so many people.

I was younger, back then, m'lud. That's me only defence.

But yes, it was me alright...

Empty Quarter

Oh, dear. Three months have passed and no post at all.

Is the Fake Plastic blog dead?

As Hemlock pointed out the other day, most of the other old UAE blogs have died. Do all blogs die one day? I suppose so - people get bored, move on, grow up, whatever. You realise that the volume of effort that goes into posting is increasingly indefensible. And that your 'hot take' on the world may well amuse you, but it's hardly worth sharing every day. As the lovely young things of Instagram are only just finding - and we found years ago - that whole sharing everything starts to become an end in itself and it doesn't really make much sense in real life.

The Fat Expat Blog was a lot of fun, for instance, but it just took too much out of us. Other UAE foodie blogs rose up from more talented people with more time on their hands.

And, increasingly, I've found I don't need to vent on here so much. I don't really need an audience (I never thought I needed one, but in reality I liked having one. A bit like Geekfest, that one - if it becomes important to you, it's probably time to stop doing it). It's not that there aren't things to vent about - my last visa renewal was a little shop of horrors, but then we all have horrible visa renewals, no?

I've got a new book in the offing, so it'd be nice to do that whole sort of 'It's important to keep the blog going as an author promotion platform' thing but then that makes you, the reader, the tool for my ambition (I'm using you, in other words, to promote my book) and it also doesn't work very well (a few, a very, very few people have read my books because they've liked my blog. It's likely in the tens, though. This is not a book promotion panacea, you understand. I'm not Boris Akunin, for instance, whose blog can pull six or ten thousand comments per post!).

I could blog about my book writing, publishing and production experience of course, but then a) it's not very interesting and b) see using people point above. I have issues laying out my content stall because I want to make people behave in a certain way ('Buy my book'). Yes, yes, I know I never had issues with that before, but I'm a different person now. Honest. No, really. I swear.

Also, please note, book posts have always been a HUGE downer on the blog. I post about whales having belly buttons or the awful shite that Tim Horton's put in their 'coffee' and you're looking at multiple thousands, even tens of thousands, of page views. Book post? A thousand or so if you're lucky and a LOT of tumbleweed knocking around.

As eny fule no, a thousand views put into the formula proposed by McNabb's Law of Clicks means a picobook is sold. It's hardly worth it, really, is it?

Anyway, I may well post again if and when the fancy takes me - but I'm clearly no longer in the 'post a day' league, as we can all see.

Meanwhile, you can always find me, of course, on Twitter!

The Dead Sea Hotel

I've gone and done the book thing again.

I finished my fifth serious novel, Birdkill, in February 2016 and that was lovely. I messed around for a while doing nothing in particular and then around May or June I started playing with a scheme that had first occurred to me back in November 2014, when I was in Cairo for a conference on the future of publishing, which took place at the Townhouse Cairo. The Goethe Institut was kind enough to fund my trip and stay and they put me up at the Windsor Hotel. To call this a fascinating place was to completely understate things. It hadn't been touched since the British had left, back when it was used as the officer's club. It was a gift, really.

Krikor Manoukian is the proprietor of the run-down Dead Sea Hotel. His beloved wife Lucine is dead, his daughter Araksi is in love and Manoukian is in debt up to his eyeballs. The last thing he needs is a dead Englishman but that’s just what he’s got. Worse, the man turns out to have been a spy who has left a valise in the hotel safe. When guests start arriving and Manoukian’s hotel fills up for the first time in years, he’s delighted: less so when they all embark on a murderous hunt for the valise. And then the devil checks in...

The idea of an Armenian running a hotel just as insanely old fashioned and decrepit as the Windsor but set in Amman, Jordan struck me as rather fun, but about 10,000 words in I stopped and put it away. I just wasn't enjoying it anymore and I had many better things to do. Two years later, I blew the cobwebs off it and started work on it again. I wasn't sure if it was genius or nuts, which is always a good sign. I sent off the first scrap to writer pals Annabel and Rachel. What did they think? They liked it. So I set to and got stuck back in. That was at the start of Ramadan. Now it's Eid, four weeks later, and I'm done. The story took over my life, the characters refused to lie down and be quiet, I was caught in manic bouts of writing; I thought about nothing else. My waking moments were little revelations, a new scene here, a quirk there.

And now it's all edited. 75,000 words of gibbering insanity and a foray into magical realism, a change of direction which you would probably understand if you had read Birdkill. I am very happy indeed with the end result which almost certainly means it's unreadable, unsaleable and unlovable. Remember, I'm the bloke that thought Space (First Amazon review: 'this book is not funny') was funny.

It's with beta readers. It's going to a few agents. And then, as usual, it'll get self published.

Sorry

Look, I've been busy. It's been crazy busy with the day job, I got loads of admin work for things 'back home' and we just spent a week in Northern Ireland for Easter.

You ever wanna take a hike somewhere beautiful? Try the Mourne Mountains...

Anyway. That's it. I've been busy. I'm sort of writing, but taking my sweet time. I'm not really taking much notice of 'Dubai life' beyond work. I'm not very interesting beyond perhaps my abiding loathing for the weevils who staff Budget Ireland and my deep rooted hatred of Skoda Rapids.

Nothing to see here, folks. Move on...

Fake Plastic Souks Is Ten

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Oh golly, oh gosh! I nearly missed it. Happy Birthday, Fake Plastic Souks! Ten years ago this month, I was sufficiently intrigued by the idea of expressing my opinion without using a pseudonym (at the time the standard approach for bloggers in Dubai) and was also missing writing magazine articles (I used to do a lot of that) enough to contemplate starting a blog. It's hard to imagine today, but back then it was all, well, terribly experimental. Now, of course, it's quaintly retro.

It all followed on from another experiment in online scribbling, a Wiki called 'Orientations' I had started to put together, which played with the idea of creating a hyperlinked series of articles that led you on an adventure, a little like playing Colossal Caves, around what was something of a stream of consciousness. PB Works, the nice people wot hosts the Wiki, have been threatening to take back that workspace for years and yet the crumbling ruins of that largely incomplete experiment still exist. The first word of the first post on Fake Plastic Souks linked, through the fiendishly clever use of houmus, back to the Wiki in a sort of nod to the past.

Here's the first Fake Plastic Souks post, linked for your clicking pleasure!

That first post was inspired by the sententious rumblings from the Arab Media Forum and amused me greatly. Like many things that amuse me greatly (my first novel, for instance), I find I am in an audience of one. Luckily, that has never detracted from my amusement. The ability to amuse oneself avoids a great deal of unpleasantness in life, I find.

An awful lot of water has flowed under the bridge since those early days, quite a lot of the events which took place around me documented as I jotted things down. It's not quite Samuel Pepys, but I occasionally enjoy stumbling across something old and dusty. In all this time, a tad over 1.2 million pages have been read. Which is nice. I would hate to think how many words I've thrown into this little cloudy corner. I've probably written about 700,000 words in my various novels (not including the two books I made from FPS posts for publishing workshop purposes) and likely more in the blog.

Oh yes, the books. There were two of them, made when I needed a text to create a sample book for a 'hands on' publishing session I did for the LitFest chaps. The first one documented 2007-2009: Fake Plastic Souks - The Glory Years. I joked that I'd do another one if that book sold more than ten copies and to my mild amazement, it did. So I made the second, Fake Plastic Souks - The Fear Returns, which covered 2009-2011. The links take you to the Kindle editions, but there are also paperbacks. I never did get around to a third one. Just as well, probably.

It all seems a little irrelevant these days. Mind you, an early and perhaps over-passionate proponent of 'social media', I now find myself yearning to sit under a tree and play with wooden toys rather than post, share, tweet and snap for the benefit of small and frequently mildly bemused audiences.

I think my favourite things from over the years are were when I 'outed' Harper Collins' Authonomy and the 'Shiny' posts, which did rather tickle me. Documenting the egregious contents of Tim Horton's French Vanilla Coffee not only provided me with amusement, it has informed something like 10,000 people. The 'stuff they put in our food' posts have always caused the most 'Yews'. My abiding interest in food, of course, led to the co-creation of Dubai's first 'food blog' with partner in crime Simon McCrum, The Fat Expat. That was finally shuttered due to lack of time and photographic talent back in 2013. TFE was never really Instagram gold, but I still use it to find recipes even today.

These days, as people may have noticed, I post rather more infrequently and have stopped looking at Sitemeter or analytics. In the early days, the blog would attract a sort of 'background radiation' of readers, about 30 or so per post. That grew to hundreds and even thousands, with anything up to 40,000 page views each month. I was just starting to think that was getting rather reasonable when I met Russian writer Boris Akunin, whose blog gets about 1,000 comments a day. When he invited readers to join him in a walk around Moscow to protest Putin, 10,000 people turned up.

I was duly humbled.

Anyway, there's no real point to this post. I just thought I'd mark the occasion...

The Unbearable Lightness Of Not Writing

English: Erik Pevernagie, painting. Representing the opposition with lightness of being (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I'm not writing.

I'm not editing or marketing, either. I'm not planning, plotting or playing with a new MS. I started a new book but it's come to a sort of 'meh' point and I've put it aside while I do other things. I've scribbled a few short stories and other things, but nothing really significant.

It's mildly embarrassing when you meet people who know you only as a booky person, because they invariably (and perfectly politely) ask what you're working on at the moment and 'I'm not really, I've just sort of got nothing right now that's floating my boat' sounds wrong.

But it's God's honest, guv. I see no reason to force things and the new project is nowhere near qualifying for that excellent advice that saw me race to get A Decent Bomber done, 'Finish!'

I'm glad I'm not under contract. The agent/publisher would be nagging, reminding me an MS is due in next month and I'd be going spare about it, wracking my brains to force words onto the screen as I write in the certain knowledge that it's not really what I want to do or, indeed, what I want to write. And, by extension, that it's not really quite good enough to put my name on it and be proud of what I've done. I'd hate that.

It's not like it matters, of course. As we speak I languish in complete obscurity as a writer, so my lack of a new project is hardly going to have the NYT worrying about the future of literature.

In fact, it's something of a bonus. There's a certain sense of relief at not having characters bumbling around in my head all the time, not worrying about getting that next scene down or being niggled by a piece of dialogue. I've been doing more cooking, ambling about on the Internet and going out at weekends to rediscover bits of the Emirates. It's amazing how you get blasé about living somewhere as downright wonderful and exotic as Lalaland.

And no, I've not been posting here very much. I realised the other day that this silly little blog of mine will turn ten years old next month. That's pretty venerable. I suppose I shall have to celebrate in some way.

In the meantime, I'm enjoying the, well, lightness of not writing...

I've Been Busy...

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I've written a children's book.

I could tell you that it was because we were riffing around with my wee niece Ellen in the summer and teasing Nanny Webster about her obsession with cheese, and so I eventually decided to write the book in time to make it one of Ells' Christmas pressies but you wouldn't believe me.

You'd probably think I did it in an explosion of jealousy at 'I only have to write 10,000 words' lunatic and childrens' writer Rachel 'Poo Pants' Hamilton. That I got sick of watching her relieving small children of their money at a rate of thousands of Dirhams an hour and decided to get myself some of that 'scoop the wee brats out of their pocket money' dosh action. And you'd be basing your assumptions on some pretty decent science - Rachel literally hoovers the stuff from kids when we do markets and stuff together. Hoovers it, I tell you.

But the truth is - honestly guvnor no word of a lie, trust me on this one - it's a present for Ellen. A book as a Christmas present is, if I say so myself, rather inspired. If you are in the fortunate position of being able to write, edit and produce books, they make a rather fun personalised gift!

And the idea for Nanny's Magical Cheese Box did, in fact, come during our stay at the wonderful Inchiquin House in the County Clare. Ellen's Dad (the book's cover designer, as it happens) had the idea and then I made up some daft story for Ellen about how Nanny saved the world using nothing more than various types of cheese and she was entranced.

I remember being like that when my Dad used to tell me stories about Charlie the Chipmunk every night when he put me to bed. Charlie was a major highlight of the day. He used to get up to all sorts of high jinks. Wonderful stuff. When I was about eleven I asked him, 'Whatever happened to Charlie the Chipmunk, Dad?' He promptly responded, 'Oh him? He's dead.'

There went innocence.

So this is going to be an interesting addition to the old Amazon profile: Middle Eastern thrillers, nukes, whores and deaths by torture alongside decent bombers and psychological thrillers about girls going bats and then we have Nanny's Magical Cheese Box.

There's precedent. Aldous Huxley, James Joyce and even Mr Macho Hemingway himself have all written children's books. Few people realise Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was written by Bond author Ian Fleming, for instance - although the original Fleming novel (published posthumously, Fleming died of a heart attack before the book went into distribution) has little to do with the story told in the popular film. Actually, something of a worry, one scathing review of Fleming's book said, "We have the adult writer at play rather than the children's writer at work."

Fleming, by the way, was an unmitigated shit as a human being. The only Bond book in which the female lead is not referred to as a 'stupid bitch' is The Spy Who Loved Me, which is (uniquely) written in the first person - that of the female protagonist, who doesn't let the side down by herself announcing, 'I know I'm a stupid bitch, but...'

All that apart, the world of children's fiction can likely rest easy. Nanny's Magical Cheese Box is going up on Createspace for the hell of it and I'll print a short run of Christmas presents with Jamalon's POD operation. I'll probably 'properly' publish it to Kindle for the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature 2017, where I'm doing a 'how to publish books' workshop thingy. Having said that (and sales of NMCB are truly the last thing on my mind), kids' books don't sell well on Kindle. It's A Great Truth that kids like paper best.

It was a whole lot of fun to do, by the way. But I think Rachel's safe. It's not really 'me' as far as the old writing career goes. Now that Nanny's Magical Cheese Box is done, I'm back to working on next novel project, The Dead Sea Hotel.

Olives - A Violent Romance And The New Book Cover

Look, first things first. I've always loved the original cover of my first serious novel, Olives - A Violent Romance, which published back in the mists of time (well, 2011). I asked Lebanese artist and designer Naeema Zarif to create it for me and her artwork was very dear to my heart. She brought together the soil and the sky, the sea and the sandy Citadel in Amman, a layer of peace treaty adding the final texture to her multi-faceted visual.

It's a lovely piece of work. But it's not a commercial book cover. Let's not forget, at the time I hardly expected to be publishing another four books and more. Beirut - An Explosive Thriller's sexy lipstick bullet (by Jessie Shoucair) set a new look for my front covers, cemented with Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy's pill skull (by Gerrard King). I've been lucky to find wonderful collaborators for my covers.

The new cover of Olives - A Violent Romance: bang on brand!

By the way, can we just remember that Olives was always a rubbish idea for the book's title? I even knew it at the time, but try as I might I couldn't break the result of the book having carried that title for years as a WIP. I added the 'A Violent Romance' line just to ameliorate some of the worst impact of setting my book up against the might of Crespo and other olive packers, let alone Mediterranean recipes and eateries of all sorts. It's as a result of this I can (and do!) with great authority tell people at talks I give about self publishing that self indulgence is a terrible, terrible thing.

With the new style covers, the world moved on. I had to bring Olives into line and so I set about trying to find cover images that would work. Having failed on all fronts, I cludged together some blood and an olives graphic. The resulting cover was certainly striking but it was, to be honest, awful. Try as I might, I couldn't get anything better together and I was really focusing more on publishing A Decent Bomber (by which time I had learned to be more careful both about my book titles and cover images) and Birdkill. It was this last work introduced me, via a serendipitous little bit of searchery, to Mary Jo Hoffman and her gorgeous daily study of still life, the ethereal little slice of nature and tranquillity that is the Still Blog. A spit in the palm and handshake later, I had her little dead fox sparrow and Birdkill had its rather lovely cover.

As I readied for the series of writing, editing and publishing workshops I gave at the Emirates Literature Foundation last month, I started to find Olives' awful cover nagging at me once again. Swinging by Mary Jo's blog, an occasional treat I still enjoy, what did I spot but images of olives? And a rather wonderful idea dawned. Hoping against hope, I got in touch and asked her if she'd be up for looking at a cover image for my (newly revised) first book? Sure, she said, why the devil not?

And so we have a new cover. Mary Jo's still threatening to work on more treatments, so it may yet change a tad but in the meantime Olives has had a good hard edit in time for the workshop (rather more painful than I had first thought it would be, I unearthed a lot more sloppy writing habits than I'd thought I'd find) a new cover and the fruits of my laziness and self indulgence have instead been replaced by those of Mary Jo's cleverness and art.

What's the impact, you may ask, of a bad book cover design and title? Well, it's measurable - both Olives - A Violent Romance and Beirut - An Explosive Thriller are available on Amazon as free downloads. And they have run at a pretty consistent rate of about 20 to 1 in favour of Beirut over the past three months Will that change now we have a new cover in place? I'll let you know when things have bedded down enough for a pattern to emerge.

In the meantime, Olives has a lovely new cover and copies are not only available online as ebooks and paperbacks, but will also be on sale in the UAE soon, too. More on that piece of news soon!

Writing And Publishing Workshop Thingies

Sharjah-stamp1 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It's been a while, I know. Holidays, work, more holidays. Stuff. Life's been busy.

I've been blogging for Sharjah. About time someone did.

I've been getting ready for  the Emirates Literature Foundation workshops starting tomorrow on how to write, edit, find a publisher or publish your own books. This has meant updating the PPTs I already have from doing these sessions before, adding new learnings and putting together a series of 'hands on' sessions as well. The sessions have sold out, which is always nice...

I'm quite busy with the ELF this last quarter of the year. On top of these workshops, I'll be doing a mentoring thing along with Mad Rachel Hamilton for NaNoWriMo and it looks like there'll be a standalone 'How to Self Publish' session in December as well. It's the UAE's Year of Reading and October is the 'Month of Reading', so there's loads going on.

I've also been quietly playing with some locally based POD solutions, which is still very much a WIP but looking mildly exciting.

The one thing I haven't been doing - to the relief of those dreading the marketing onslaught - is writing another book. There's no plan and I'm in no hurry. That's the nice thing about not having publishers and contracts breathing down your neck. Beirut and Olives are both popular free downloads over at Amazon and the other books have been trundling along nicely on the back of the freebies. You still have to put out a lot of freebies to sell a handful of books, mind.

So there. Consider yourself updated...

How To Write, Edit And Publish Your Novel

I've done a number of workshops over the past few years which set out to help accelerate people's booky journeys by sharing with them some of the more useful things I have found out in my own sixteen years of writing, publishing and selling books. Mostly I have discovered things the hard way and the idea is just because I did, doesn't mean you have to.

Now I'm doing a new and expanded series together with the Emirates Literature Foundation, set to take place in their august and hallowed halls: four workshops which combine presentation-led talks with hands-on practical sessions where attendees can put some of the stuff we talk about into practice.

You can go straight here and sign up right away 'cos places are really limited!

Starting Saturday 17th September, each five hour workshop breaks into two hours talk, an hour's lunchtime chatting and a two-hour practical session. They run through until 8th October.

In session one, we'll be looking at how to write a book, a big picture overview of why you'd even want to, what to expect, how to structure your story and some guidelines for writing. The second session will look at editing techniques as well as some practical guidance on things like characterisation, dialogue, scene-setting and all that good stuff. 

We'll give session three over to understanding publishing - what the industry looks like right now, what that means to you and how you go about pitching your book to agents, as well as understanding more about what traditional publishing means to you as an author. 

And then, last but by no means least, we'll be looking in session four at how self publishing works and how you can do it for yourself, including what platforms to use, formatting books and covers, uploading them and a look at promotion and marketing.

All in all these sessions are intended to give you everything you need to get started on making that book you always thought you had in you happen, working within a sensible and supportive environment together with a bunch of people going through exactly what you're going through. As I said, I've done a number of these workshops in the past and people have generally enjoyed them, there have been a minimum number of breakdowns or violent assaults and no requests for refunds, so people generally seem to enjoy them and find them useful. Or maybe they're just too embarrassed to complain...

Here's that sign-up link again over at the ELF website - see you there!

If you have any questions, please do hit me up over at Twitter - @alexandermcnabb and if you haven't come across me or my books before (where HAVE you been hiding?) you can find out more over here.

shjSEEN - Sharing Sharjah Things, Stuff And Stories

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I'm contributing blog posts to an interesting project called shjSEEN, which is being run by the Sharjah Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

The idea is to take a fresh look at Sharjah and perhaps delve into the many hidden joys, delights and treasures of The Cultured Emirate, under the tagline 'One city, lots of soul'.

I can hear you Dubai types scoffing as I type, so you can stop that right now, pally. Sharjah's got a great deal going for it - all you have to do is look beyond your brunches, blingy bars and chain stores. And you can get over that wailing about the traffic, while you're at it. At the weekends, when Sharjah's arguably at its best, it's generally a breeze.

Sharjah HAS got soul, lots of it. From the area where I live (whose tribal leader, in the 1920s, invaded Ajman and occupied its fort), down to Al Khan on the Dubai border (where a protracted gun-fight took place between Dubai and a gang of dissidents, which stopped each day to let the charabanc of British travellers on Imperial Airways pass), Sharjah's got history. Loads of it. There are Umm Al Nar tombs, iron age settlements and ancient cities, forts and trade routes that go back - literally - to the dawn of humanity. There's the history of trade, from the lovingly restored (and beautiful) Souq Al Arsah and Heart of Sharjah through to Mahatta, the fort which was built as the Gulf's first airport hotel.

There are sights to see, from Mleiha's world-class visitor centre to the many museums, art galleries and exhibitions. There's loads to do, from dune bashing over fossil rock, chilling out in Khor Fakkan (Sharjah's the only Emirate with coastline on both the Arabian Gulf and Indian Ocean) through to wandering around the Sharjah Desert Park with its Natural History Museum, Wildlife Centre and Botanical Gardens.

In Sharjah you can buy diamonds, pearls, oud and bukhour, ambergris, musk and antiques, from old stamps and coins from the UAE and wider Middle East through to khanjars and water jars: you can wander perfume souks, spice souks, old souks, new souks and even gold and blue souks. You can take the kids to the aquarium or to play as you enjoy a waterside coffee at Al Qasba, or Al Majaz. Or let them go wild in the rides, swings and waterpark at Montaza.

If you fancy a full-on Friday brunch without having to fight off hooning, red-faced drunks in Paul Smith shirts and Coast dresses, the Radisson Blu does a family one including pool and beach access, so you can snooze it off - and cooks up some of the best Lebanese food you'll find outside Beirut. The Sheraton Sharjah does a glorious afternoon tea for pennies.

So I'll be looking forward to writing about these things and more - because there is, yes, a lot more. It's all rather fun, I must say!

shjSEEN is linked here for your Sharjah browsing pleasure!

Still In Limbo. Enjoying Limbo. And Ginger Beer.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I realised things were getting pretty desperate when I started growing a ginger beer plant. I used to have one of these as a kid, gifted to me by someone who hated me.

I used to sell the resulting ginger beer at school. It was mildly alcoholic and popular. Things got out of hand when the school market became saturated and I had to run for it before the teachers found out why their classes were suddenly filled with a mild ethanol and ginger miasma and their lessons greeted with enthusiasm that quickly slipped into grinning torpor.

Ginger beer plants are a curse. You grow one, it makes ginger beer and you end up with two. So you make twice as much ginger beer. It's a mad experiment in exponential escalation a la the wheat and chessboard problem. A couple of weeks later your house is filled with bubbling carboys and near-exploding bottles, cloudy brews and the undeniably rich yeasty reek of fermentation. Your garage is a cellar and your garden has become a storage zone. So you start to give away ginger beer plants. To people you hate.

Trying to grow a ginger beer plant in Sharjah is probably a) illegal and certainly b) pointless. I wouldn't even have contemplated it except I have acquired some small ceramic-stoppered bottles and feel guilty about throwing such pretty little things away. Oh, and because I hadn't got a writing project on the go, I was suffering from serious terminal purposelessness.

Now I have two such projects. They're jostling for my attention. One is a recounting of Gerald Lynch's early history in Civil War Beirut. The other I can't even talk to you about. Seriously.

The ginger beer plant's been chucked out. I wasn't really serious about making ginger beer.

Honestly, ossifer.

That Was The LitFest That Was

I'm feeling slightly shell-shocked this morning. The weekend's whirl is over and I realised, probably massively belatedly but then I am a bear of remarkably little brain, from the moment I started the process of editing and formatting Birdkill, I was preparing for it.

I got roped into a panel on science fiction at the last minute, which was a little bit strange. One of the panellists decided we were all going to start with a reading which I thought odd, but I was feeling benign and generally happy go lucky and so went along with the scheme. There should be a law banning people who assert they 'read rather well' from ever reading their books to an audience.

The invitation to a science fiction panel came because of the mad eugenics, drugs and battlefield enhancement program that's at the heart of Birdkill. I thought of explaining that it's actually reflective of some real-life, modern-day programs run by people like DARPA but threw that up and just agreed to it. In all things bookish, I have a policy of never, ever saying 'no' to anything - something I have rarely had cause to regret, BTW.

It all went well enough, I suppose and we chatted happily about how Sci-Fi has sort of grown up and is no longer the guilty secret read it was when I was a kid, how writing 'near future' Sci-Fi is harder than space opera and other stuff. I was there more as a fan than anything, I suppose. I managed to get in a dig about how explorer of suburban dystopias JG Ballard would have loved writing a novel set in Arabian Ranches, which was all rather fun.

I went to Justin Marozzi's talk about Baghdad which was great. One of the perks of being a LitFest author is your wee badge gives you 'access all areas' and you can attend sessions without a ticket - something I always manage to make all too little use of. I had read Marozzi's history of Baghdad with fascination and similarly enjoyed his presentation. Of course he had to tell the Haroun Al Rashid story. Tsk Tsk.

The how to find your route to publication and onto shelves panel was an absolute hoot. Having in previous years found myself debating the role of traditional publishing vs self publishing with people like Luigi Bonomi (the world's nicest literary agent) and Orion's Kate Mills (an eminently sensible and most likeable lady), it was nice to finally encounter someone who represented the face of traditional publishing I felt I could really disagree with. Jonathan Lloyd is chairman of Curtis Brown, a very big London literary agency, and he was eventually provoked into aiming a sentence at me starting with 'With all due respect' - a phrase all English people know means 'I am about to be rude to you' and Jonathan didn't fail us, advising me that perhaps I might better spend my time learning how to write well instead of dancing around wasting it playing at book marketing.

I am very glad, in hindsight, that I noted the English preamble to discourtesy rather than trying to address the assumption behind it. I'd have come across as an angry and defensive person and I most certainly am neither of those (at least when it comes to writing and publishing my books!). I'm perfectly happy that traditional publishing should continue to strive to exist, as I am that they have clearly decided the things that interest me and how I tell my stories are not for them. Given that, the swipe rather back-fired. Mind, I don't think I'll be signed up by Curtis Brown any time soon...

Arrow's Selina Walker took perhaps a more benign view of the changing face of publishing and the opening up of the market to wider choice and it was clear that publishers and agents are no longer quite as aligned as they once were. Jonathan's assertion that agents were on the side of the author while publishers were in it for themselves drew a polite, measured but I felt slightly pained response.

This was the stuff though - I would describe the panel as lively and it must have been highly entertaining for the audience, which is what you're after really, isn't it?

But I had the most fun the next day, with the panel on crime I shared with Chris Carter and Sebastian Fitzek, both of whom write about serial killers, psychopaths and really, really bad people. I noted to the audience that I felt like something of a fraud - my bad guys are just bad, but they're pussies compared to Chris and Sebastian's bad guys. My bad guys steal ice creams from small kids, stuff like that. They won't rape you while they're sucking out your brains with a straw. Truth be told, my good guys are more of a worry...

We talked about research - meeting IRA members, serial killers and forensic surgeons; about inhabiting the grey area between good and evil; about creating empathy for horrible characters and how you handle putting yourself in the head of a killer. I did a lot of book plugging, for which I am truly contrite.

Both Chris and Sebastian are very nice guys who have some worrying stuff going on in their heads, but they're engaging and genial talkers who conjured a great deal of laughter from the audience. We wrapped up on the hour and it was clear both authors and audience would gladly have stayed another hour and more bouncing all these questions, ideas and experiences around.

We signed books afterwards and some people turned up to have me sign my books which is lucky because that doesn't usually happen and I was dreading getting sandwiched between two international best-sellers with my usual queue of three (mind you, they put me next to 'House of Cards' author Michael Dobbs the day before. As usual, a line disappearing into the horizon next to the yawning space left in front of me after I'd signed a few books. Le sigh.)

As usual, the LitFest team were glorious, wonderful, patient and kind. If there was a single hitch or hiccup, I certainly didn't spot it. Tens of thousands of people, 160 authors, hundreds of sessions, events, happenings, talks and signings. And it was all as seamless as a seamless thing.

So here we are. Facing a world without the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature - at least for another year. What AM I going to do?

Not write another book for a while, I can tell you...

Schools. You Gotta Love Them...

Pristine Private School is one of a number of schools clustered in the middle of tower blocks and residential buildings in Dubai's northern Al Twar area. Yes. I checked. No dust.

I was there as an author from the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature, to talk to the 'seniors' about narrative and stuff. The hall was very high but not huge in of itself. The stage was huger and the first thing I made up my mind about was not to use it, but to stay at ground level. The kids filed in: girls to the right, boys to the left. Like a dolt, I hadn't told the faculty I needed an LCD and laptop (my own laptop only does HDMI output) to plug my PPT into. They procured both in seconds flat, smilingly.

Me, I'd have killed me, but you takes yer luck as yer finds it.

So we're talking about 100 students in all, something like that. I told 'em about narrative and its history, why it's so important to learn to tell stories for all sorts of reasons: commercial applications of narrative, social applications. Political applications. How you can define and build change around narrative and counter-narrative. How narrative is used to define people, religions, races. How people telling your story when you're not telling it is not a good thing. Basically, to forget what your mum and dad told you and become good at telling stories: the taller the tales you tell, the better.

I told 'em about how publishing was being screwed by the Internet and associated technologies and about disintermediation and what it means. How the democratisation of knowledge that Gutenberg's press imposed on Europe was being repeated by the web and ebooks. And then I talked about my own journey into publishing and my books. I told 'em about the madness of restrictions on taking 100ml of liquid on aircraft when the IRA's last great bomb weighed 1.5 metric tonnes and blew out the heart of Manchester. And, of course, about women going insane while their friends race to try and find out the root of that existentially threatening turmoil. As you do...

Narrative. This sort of thing. 17,000 years in a few slides...

The questions tumbled in. Writer's block. How do you shape narratives? Does a book really always have to start with someone in 'normal' life who's then disrupted by a triggering event? Isn't that something of a trope? How do you take an idea for the beginning, middle and end of a book and connect that up into a whole story?

I was given a bouquet of flowers and a fancy wee trophy as a thank you. They didn't have to do that, really. I signed books. I lost count of how many. Can you spell your name please? Sorry was that Humaid or Hamed? Shayma or Shaima? Ayesha or Aisha? The girls all wanted Olives and I sold out. Which was a bummer because my next stop was Dubai's English College and I didn't have any copies for the students that wanted it. I ran late and had to dash across the city to make it to English College on time.

Gathered in the library of English College was a smaller group. Same talk, essentially. A few variations. A wee bit looser with the old demotic Anglo Saxon. Fewer questions at the end, a quiet room. And then they all clustered around to buy books and the questions came one on one that they hadn't felt they could ask in a group. Signing away, chatting about which book I preferred, how I had thought this or that up. How do you connect stories together? How do you actually, you know, publish a book? How do you upload files to Amazon? Why did I feel a connection to the Middle East? Had I ever lived in Beirut? What's a good book cover vs a bad one? Where can I get Olives? Guilt trip, that last one. I shouldn't have let them all go to the last school...

Bright as a button, both groups. A genuine interest in telling stories, in narrative and a love of books and writing. You could see some of them really having revelatory moments, while a few were there on sufferance. Most were chatty, engaging and cheeky with a lot of sparkiness and wit on display.

What a way to spend the day. I could do this for weeks on end, honestly. What they made of the sessions I can only guess. Some old shouty man berated us for an hour and made us buy his books and I didn't even want him scrawling on the title page and miss-spelling my name.

The author's dinner is next. We always has fun at this. Not always for the right reasons, you understand...

What? MOAR LitFest Panels?

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I'm doing a third panel at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature, "Future Shock: Writing from a Sci-Fi World" after LitFest luminary Aedan caught a blog post about Birdkill and realised it had weird sciency eugenics stuff in it.

The panel blurb goes thusly:

Humanity has found itself living in the future, and it could be argued that so far we have singularly failed to rise to the challenge. We ask our panel of three very different authors, who generally write in other genres but have recently written one or more science fiction novels – will we survive the world we are creating?

You could argue, funnily enough, that silly first novel Space was science fiction (I'd have called it a high tech thriller spoof, but what I call my books has nothing to do with what people get up to. Just ask that there 'trilogy' of Middle Eastern spy thrillers), so I've got previous 'form', but Birdkill's spooky Hamilton Institute certainly would appear to be the stuff of futurism, although as we now know it's not really far fetched at all.

I've been doing a lot of work in the day job related to futurism and have always sort of paddled in the march of technology area, right from back when I used to write for, edit and publish computer and telecoms magazines and books. So this might be quite fun. I'm joining Dr Who novelist Jenny Colgan as well as space opera author Garth Nix to kick around the proposition that humanity may not survive its own inventions.

The panel's from 10-11am on Friday 11th March at the Al Baraha 1 room at the Intercon Festival City. It's linked here for your convenient LitFest ticket buying pleasure.

And don't forget, you can also come along to:

And Now the Hard Part: Getting Your Book into Print and onto Shelves 
Friday 11 March, 3.30pm-4.30pm Al Ras 2, InterContinental 

Where me and another writer type join two publishing types to talk about getting picked up, marketed and generally turned into a best selling international smash hit sensation. 

Crime Across Continents: How to catch a killer
Saturday 12 March, 11.30am-12.30pm Al Ras 1, InterContinental

Where I join worryingly capable inventors of nasty serial killers Chris Carter and Sebastian Fitzek to talk about how you make your bad guys really, really bad.

Birdkill: Why I Couldn't Quite Get Out Of The Middle East

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

'You write very well, you know. You just need to get out of the Middle East. It's doing you no favours. We really, really don't care about it.'

So did a prominent London literary agent advise me. The words hit home hard: I had thought being the only person writing spy thrillers set in this most colourful and conflicted area since Eric Ambler gave us The Levanter would be a good thing, but apparently not. The 'we' he referred to was the Great British Public - the people UK publishers want to sell books to.

I didn't have a firm 'next project' lined up after Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy and I had been toying with the idea of making a book out of my 'Uncle Pat' joke. And so was born A Decent Bomber. I set about abandoning the Middle East with as much distress and compunction as the average psychopath has for his victim. How was I to know that, in terms of attracting British publishing, the next worst place on earth to set a book after the Middle East was Northern Ireland?

By Birdkill I'd given up trying to please anyone but myself, and yet the book was to be set in the UK. It is explicitly not located anywhere in particular. I started out with my short story as a basis and began to construct a narrative around it. That narrative exploded, pages filling with great rapidity as the dreams that had formed the beginning and end of the book raced to meet each other.

Soon enough, Mariam Shadid came calling and simply refused to leave. Great, so now I've got a Lebanese journalist with frizzy hair and a taste for combat trousers and a click-hungry Middle Eastern scandal/gossip website. The Edgware Road poked its damn oud, shisha and cardamom coffee-scented nose in. The pull continued: Robyn's past was drawn inexorably to Zahlé with its restaurants alongside the rushing little torrent of the Berdawni River and its tiled rooftops scattered across the rolling Beqaa. And then, if that wasn't all bad enough, the Château Ksara came calling with its beguiling wiles and wines.

Mary was chatting with Félicie at reception when the Englishman stalked in, an overgrown beanpole of a man, grey-haired with an aristocratic English nose and points of piercing blue under bushy brows. He looked dry and papery, but powerful. The Lebanese have a nose for power, she surmised. Some are attracted to it, seek it; moths to a candle. Others flee it, fearing the trouble and disruption it brings to our precarious lives. She sighed.

‘I would like to speak with Monsieur Delormes as a matter of urgency, please.’ He announced to Félicie who was, and this was her way if you but knew her, unimpressed. She flicked her hair back and glanced over at Mary with a hint of a roll to her eyes.

‘Would you? Who will I say is calling?’

‘Lawrence Hamilton. It is in regard to his new patient.’

Mary tried not to betray her interest. ‘I can take him there.’ She tried to mask her quickening with a shrug. ‘If you like.’

And quite where Sister Mary, the fag-smoking Lebanese nun, came from I could not even begin to tell you, even if you put the thumb screws on.

There's not much Lebanon in there, to be honest, but there's a scattering. Enough to let you know that the Middle East ain't giving me up that easily. Which, oddly enough, I find something of a comfort...

Back to Skool - Let The LitFest Fun Commence

I love school visits. They're sort of part of being at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature. You don't have to do them but there's a lot of effort put into integrating the Festival with local schools and authors are asked if they will drop by a school or two and give a talk to students.

I always jump at the chance. I get to behave like I'm a real author and everything. The faculty usually gets a bit twitchy, because I don't do 'PC' so well, but it normally comes right in the end. I try and use the opportunities as something of a sales pitch to get students thinking about writing their own stories. It's not just about thinking you've got a book in you: narrative is a powerful tool in communications and story-telling permeates pretty much everything we get up to in the nasty, commercial world we're bringing up our kids to inhabit.

Which is sort of funny, given our mums always told us that telling stories was a bad thing to do.

Tomorrow I'm off to Al Ain, where two groups of students from Brighton College are going to spend an hour or two with a strange, shouty man bawling incoherently at them. Next week it's English College and Pristine Private School. I'll be testing the surfaces for dust at that last one.

It's hard to believe, but we're only two sleeps from the LitFest - that fine bonanza of all things narrative, bookish and even literary. 140 writers from 25 countries are set to workshop, panel session, chat, sign books and generally delight something like 37,000 visitors. This year's Festival theme is 'time' and there's a huge programme planned which will take place across two weeks, both over at Shindaga and at the Intercon Festival City where the main programme takes place.

The Festival has grown like a mad thing over the few years it's been running. It's created new writers and seen people getting publishing contracts, start writing for themselves and expand into writing for others.

People have been self-publishing books, forming writers' groups, book clubs and generally enjoying books all the more. The Festival has, in short, triggered all sorts of growth in the literary scene in the UAE and even beyond in the wider Arab world.

The increasing focus on the Arabic programme has created a new opportunity to expand readership and contemporary literature in a language that has seen all too little focus on literature in recent years.

We've seen UAE-based writers clinching publishing contracts, new writers emerging and a vibrancy in the literary scene here which simply didn't exist before the Festival started taking place.

And all because a lady with a bookshop in Dubai woke up one day and thought 'Wouldn't it be lovely to have a literature festival?'

It's staggering, really...