And Now the Hard Part: Getting Your Book Into Print And Onto Shelves

That's the title of the publishing type panel session I'm sitting on at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature 2016. The other gig I'm doing is also about acts of murder: I'm talking crime fiction with fellow criminal minds Christ Carter and Sebastian Fitzek.

I swear they just put me on these panels to cause trouble, but it keeps going wrong. I got put on one a few years ago with Luigi Bonomi only to find my plan of whacking him over the back of a head with a tyre lever washing up against the uncomfortable fact that he's one of the most pleasant, smiley people in publishing.

Similarly, last year I shared a stage with Orion supremo Kate Mills who turned out to be rather a love and not the mean old harridan I had psyched myself up to confront. We got on rather well, as it turns out, and agreed about a great deal more than we disagreed about.

When I started this here publishing journey, I was full of wide-eyed surety. I have posted before about the Dunning-Kruger effect and my long, slow realisation that publishing didn't want me. It used to make me angry, certainly self-publishing Olives - A Violent Romance was an act of fury triggered when my own agent couldn't be bothered to look at - let alone shop - the book.

But I've had so much fun since then, I don't really have that anger any more. Mainstream publishing doesn't want me and that's just fine: we can co-exist, ploughing our respective furrows in the rich soil that is the reading public. I'm a tad weary of promotion these days and really could use some help with marketing and getting 'reach' into markets outside the UAE, but I didn't even wait for my small test sample of agents to reject Birdkill before deciding to self-publish the book. I'm sort of done with the old cycle of submission and rejection. I have a life to lead.

For myself, I now believe that publishing doesn't want me because I don't sit comfortably topically. It's not about the quality of writing, characterisation and other technical stuff. It's because the things that interest me don't immediately scream 'mainstream appeal' - the Middle East, the grey areas of morality, bad guys you empathise with, good guys who are weak-minded, men dying of cancer and betrayal and retired IRA bombers don't top agents' lists of books just made to sell themselves. And yet I clearly have a readership - the sellout local book sales, rave reviews, feedback from book clubs and all the other good stuff that's been happening tell me that.

I think the million dollar question facing this panel is not really so much 'how do you get an agent and publisher', there have arguably been too many words thrown into the wind about those two topics for any of us to have anything more useful to say on the topic.

For me the question is more, 'What's the secret sauce? What makes book A a soaraway bestseller and book B a guaranteed dud?' Century and Arrow publisher Selina Walker, who gave us 50 Shades of Grey, and Jonathan Lloyd, who heads major agency Curtis Brown, should certainly have some answers. And our fellow panellist Sean Fay Wolf, whose Minecraft themed fan fiction got him picked up by Harper, has undoubtedly tasted of that elusive sauce.

The question is finding it and amplifying it. And that's where I think this panel will be so interesting. The publishers on the panel will either have cracked it or be foundering, as clueless as I as to how you do this thing in the atomised world of the Web and its Medusine long tails. Finding out which of the two states they inhabit are itself be a thing of great fascination.

I'm not setting out to misbehave this year. But I can promise you this panel will be nothing less than mesmerising and insightful. This based on the other panellists, clearly...

The panel is linked here if you want to buy tickets at Dhs70 each. If not...

Birdkill, Books And The Demon Drink

I suppose there is, one way and another, quite a bit of drinking in my books. Space, my silly first effort at writing, was originally packed with smoking scenes precisely because it was written in the throes of me chucking up my Olympian 60 a day smoking habit. I can't say the same for the other books. And while Space does feature the occasional drinkie, my personal favourite is the scene where daft sex-worker and Jessica Rabbit lookalike Kylie discovers the non-alcoholic French drink 'Montalow'...

Of course, thanks to hard-drinking anti-spy Gerald Lynch, there's a good deal of Scotch put away in Olives, Beirut and Shemlan. But it was Paul Stokes in Olives - A Violent Romance who started it:

I dutifully pretended it was, indeed, news to me and thanked him, hung up and poured more whisky into my glass, walking through the house into the garden, where I stood looking over the lights of the city. I went back and poured more until eventually, quite drunk, I held the heavy-based tumbler between my two fingers above the flagstone floor in the kitchen and let it fall, bright and scintillating in the halogen spots as it twisted through the air, shattering on the stone. A thousand reflective shards skittered across the floor. I went, unsteady on my feet, to bed where I lay in the darkness, trying to stop the room from spinning.

There was a hint of sulphur around the Jordanian family in Olives drinking, which provoked no small amount of sniffiness at the time. How could I possibly portray members of a Muslim family drinking alcohol? That never happens in Abdoun. Perish the thought.

I set myself the unenviable task of killing someone using a bottle of champagne in Beirut - An Explosive Thriller. Not battering them to death with it, but using the liquid. It's actually quite hard finding an untraceable poison that dissolves in liquid and I'm not quite sure why my Google life at the time didn't have the cops around with copies of the local pharmacy's poison book in hand. I eventually settled on a nice dose of potentiated chlorzoxazone...

Meier nodded graciously. He sipped his champagne, noticing how fine the flute was, holding the dry, complicated drink in his mouth and revelling in the fact that a lifetime’s work had culminated in this – a new identity, a new life of reward and luxury. The stress of the past few weeks was making itself felt now as he relaxed, a feeling of lassitude creeping over him. He placed the glass down on the coffee table, and Freij reached over to top it up.

‘It is a particularly fine champagne, no, Herr Meier?’

Meier nodded. ‘I have always preferred Sekt, of course, being German. But I have to confess, when the French get it right ...’

Freij sat back in his chair. ‘Lamiable is a small house, a grand cru, of course, from near Tours. Sixty percent Pinot Noir, forty percent Chardonnay. We can enjoy champagne because of the Levant, you know this, Herr Meier? The Chardonnay grape was taken back to France by the Crusaders. My ancestors.’

The champagne I chose to use to kill a man in Beirut was a relatively esoteric single-grower extra brut called Lamiable, which is solely imported into the UK by the excellent Charles Meyrick of Balthazar Wines. Otherwise dependable as they come, Charles turned fink and shared the book with the family who make the wine. They were reportedly somewhat bemused to find their very fine beverage applied in such a casually murderous manner. Sometimes this writing lark is SO worth it all. I'm still laughing, to tell the truth...

Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy had the occasional glass in it, too; Lamiable returned for a cameo role, but old Lynch was on the demon drink with a vengeance again... One of my favourite characters in the book was the tubercular old General in Aleppo, dying his death in a souq that, tragically, events have managed to ensure, at deaths door though he was, he probably outlasted.

The General sat in the middle of the room next to a pot-bellied stove, a dull metal table to his side carrying a bottle of whisky and an overflowing ashtray. There were two glasses, one half-empty. The table was scattered in coins as was, Lynch noticed, the windowsill. The General sat in a wheelchair, his twisted legs covered in a beige woolly blanket. He had withered, his great frame shrunken inside clothes that were too big for him.

The Sandhurst English voice was still strong. ‘Come in, damn you, you Irish bastard. There’s a chair over there.’

Lynch lifted the bottle out of the bag and onto the table. He pulled up the battered wooden schoolroom chair, its scrape echoing in the empty room. The General nodded appreciatively at the Green Label. He unpeeled the foil, pulled out the cork and poured Lynch a stiff drink. He fumbled for the pack of cigarettes and lit one, puffing smoke from grey-blue lips under his great yellowing white moustache. There was an unhealthy sheen on his forehead and he started to cough, a rumbling noise that ended in a great walrus bark.

A Decent Bomber, set in Ireland as it is, has the odd Guinness in it. Pat O'Carolan isn't much of a drinker, perhaps the occasional hot whiskey on a cold night up on the Cummermore Bog is pretty much the only glass he takes. The two Irish politicians, Driscoll and MacNamara, are quite fond of a pint, though...

He glanced at the door of the pub as it admitted sunshine and the clamour of the street. Brian MacNamara’s big frame blocked out the sunlight momentarily. The pub was empty save for the two of them and the young barman, who poured MacNamara’s pint unbidden.

‘Well, now Sean. How’s the man?’

‘I’m good, Brian. Looking forward to the win, you know yourself.’

MacNamara eyed the three-quarters full glass resting on the bar, the creamy froth billowing. The barman slid it back under the tap to finish it off. He laid the pint down with a diffident nod and took himself away to the other end of the bar.

‘Slàinte.’ Driscoll raised his glass and drank. ‘So what’s this great mystery that brings you galloping from campaign headquarters on a Sunday morning right before the election?’

MacNamara brooded over his pint, his keen eye on Driscoll. ‘Quinlan is dead.’

Birdkill has quite a few very intentional mentions of Ksara, that most excellent of wines from a monastically established Château just outside the town of Zahlé. This town, the capital of the Beqaa, nestles red-roofed and splendiferous in the foothills of Mount Sannine. It sits atop the Berdawni River, the banks of the torrent lined with restaurants and shisha joints. In the evening, it becomes magical in the way only the Middle East becomes magical at night. It is to Zahlé Robyn Shaw travelled to work as a teacher, and it was here something terrible happened to her and it was here, in her obliterated past, Robyn's appalling secret lies. And it is in the glasses of Ksara the dark, blood-red spirit of her past is echoed.

Warren delved into the drawer and pulled out a corkscrew. He stripped the lead from a bottle of red wine and pulled the cork. He twisted the label to face her. Ksara. Mariam stared at the cream label with its pencil drawing of the Château nestled in its vineyards, the letters picked out in gold. Her gaze flew to meet his brown eyes. He was smiling. ‘I make it my business to know stuff. It’s how you stay alive when you deal with bad people.’

Anyway, here's a glass to books... Slàinte!

How To Start Writing A Book

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I've posted in times past on how to write a book. I've posted about how to edit a book - and most certainly how to publish a book, as well as my own booky journey. And I've posted a lot about book marketing. I've probably posted about how to murder a publisher, too.

But I've never talked about how you actually start a book. You know, how you sort of decide you want to do it then knuckle down and actually get on with it. That moment when you realise, 'Here I am. I'm actually doing this. I'm writing a book!' is something else. But how do you, you know, get there?

And so @dollz87 on Twitter made a good point today. It's all very well talking about this here Emirates Airline Festival of Literature 2016 'How to get your book published' session wot I'm taking part in, but how DO you stop talking about writing a book and actually start writing a book?

For myself, I had a couple of false starts. I most certainly had not the faintest idea of what writing a book entails. It's probably lucky I didn't, because I'd probably have found something more destructive and less intelligent to do instead. My first book 'Space' started with me writing a scene set outside the Pompidou Centre in Paris. I had a character, René the Horse, in mind. I wrote about 1,500 words and then the file sat on my Toshiba T1600 (showing my age, but it was one flash puppy of a PC to own back in those days) for years as it rotted in my brother in law's attic. It's still there, for all I know...

When I eventually decided to write a book, I sort of had René in mind, but I had to get from the start of a book over to him in Paris. I dreamed up the idea of an auto-manifesting chicken and started writing...

The chicken appeared on the kitchen worktop with a percussive ‘pop’, interrupting Ben Jonson’s rummage in the fridge for something to eat before afternoon surgery. There was little on offer: stale bread, no butter and a pot of slightly mouldy jam. Scanning the kitchen for the source of the noise, Ben found himself looking at a particularly magnificent roasted chicken on a ceramic dish. It was occupying a space that had previously contained neither chicken nor dish.

A soft hissing sound fizzled into silence. The chicken was plump, still warm and its rich, savoury fragrance filled the air. Ben’s mouth pricked with saliva. He’d eaten nothing since yesterday lunchtime and now he was looking at a glistening, freshly roasted chicken. 

Licking his lips, partly from animal lust and partly from apprehension, Ben scanned the room. Just a kitchen. He looked up. Just a kitchen ceiling. 

The disconnect overwhelmed Ben’s response to sudden bounty. He felt like a laboratory mouse: If you press this button, food appears. His mind raced, grasping for explanations like a lunatic reaching for butterflies. This was wrong. The chicken had failed to follow due process. Chickens are born in hatcheries, raised in farms. De-beaked, plucked, dipped, shocked, slashed, racked, packed and stacked, bagged, bought, stored, stuffed, cooked and scoffed. They know their place, do chickens: they’re food. Except he hadn’t bought this chicken, and he hadn’t cooked this chicken. This was new chicken. Inexplicable chicken. Chicken á la quiz. He reached across to the oven and opened the door. It was cold.

You can buy 'Space' here for 99p. It still makes me laugh, I must confess.

And so I was away. 100,000 words later, I leaned back with a sigh of satisfaction and decided I deserved a Martini. Space was written and I could now unleash my genius on literary London. The rest, as they say, was pants.

But how do you START? I've got news for you. It's really easy. Here's my $1mn super secret writer's tip: just start. Get it down on paper, at least the first few pages. Start writing. Now begin to think about what it is you're building here. Ideally, sketch out the big idea and then break it down into chapters, building your big idea in an outline. Don't stop writing while you're doing this, keep the momentum going. Don't put off writing to do planning, but write as you plan. The further ahead you plan, the better, but don't stop writing, whatever you do.

Start by writing down your opening scene. Don't sweat this too much, it'll likely never make it to the final cut, but make a start. Finish whatever you write in that first session and have a think about where you want to take it next. Start again with the next session and read over what you wrote before, then take up the quill again and write more. Repeat.

Scope out a 'writing time' for yourself. For me, it's first thing in the morning before the office wakens (I spend half an hour thinking in the car and then an hour writing. I'll write in the evenings as well when I can. Morning me leaves notes for evening me. I write on Fridays, too. I'm married to a teacher, so she spends Fridays planning. We're happy enough, both beavering away in our study.). You're looking at giving yourself a daily 1,000 words to write. You don't have to DO this, but have it as a target. 400 well written and considered words that resolve a problem are better than 1,000 sketchy ones that leave you with a problem later on, believe me. But if you end the week 7,000 words to the wise, give yourself a massive pat on the back.

Don't tweet, don't let yourself get distracted. Switch the Internet off. Just concentrate on that story, the big picture one, the scenes you're building and the story you want to tell. Think about things when you're not writing, dream up characters and their backgrounds, their stories and their lives. Steal quirks from people. Keep writing. Every day. Even a few words. Keep writing. Keep writing.

And you'll do it. Trust me, you'll do it. Don't bother with NaNoWriMo type deadlines, that's a sure-fire route to a rubbish book and a huge editing job (an editor friend dreads the end of NaNoWriMo because he knows what sort of MSs are going to start dropping on him). Stick to your 1,000 words a day as best you can and just plug away at it.

Believe me. The second you've started, you're on the way to finishing. By the fourth or fifth second you're committed. A couple of minutes in, you're carving your way to success. A few days in and you're a writer, writing. Don't worry too much about all that show don't tell sort of stuff (maybe have a read of this here handy post), or even worrying about POV and other writing techniques for now (there's time for that later), but focus on telling your story.

Once you've given those first few days to it, you're on the way to redemption. It's just like giving up smoking, but in reverse. And that's how I did it: I gave up smoking and my novel became my new obsession.

Just remember the golden rule: start now. Seriously. Right now. Close this window and open Word, take a deep breath and just write something. There. You've started. You can worry about the rest later. If you need a shoulder to cry on, it's @alexandermcnabb. But NOT in your writing time, hear me?

Good luck!

Birdkill And The 2016 Emirates Airline Festival Of Literature

Birdkill launches on the 1st March - I may have forgotten to mention that? If I did, sorry. This coincides with the first day of the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature 2016 in Dubai, UAE. The book will be on sale in paperback at said LitFest, as well as online.

I will also be infesting da LitFest, this year. I'm taking part in two panels, so here are the details if you want to avoid them:

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

Chris Carter's Robert Hunter books are set in LA. Sebastian Fitzek’s 'Therapy' knocked the Da Vinci Code off the German no. 1 spot. Alexander McNabb you know very well, thank you.

The three of us are tasked with talking about what it is that makes a bad guy really, really bad and how, having made your really, really bad bad guy, you bring him to justice (or, in my case, just as likely let him away with it).

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

Sean Fay Wolfe self-published Minecraft FanFic novel Quest for Justice, which was picked up by HarperCollins. Jonathan Lloyd is Chairman of Literary Agency Curtis Brown. Alexander McNabb will be causing trouble at this one, I can tell you and Selina Walker is Publisher at Century and Arrow. She brought us Fifty Shades of Grey among other things.

Jonathan and Selina will tell you how to succeed in publishing, Sean will tell you about the unconventional route to success and I'll be talking about how not succeeding is not only an option, but thoroughly enjoyable for all that.

Come along, hurl abuse, heckle. Buy my books, they'll all be on sale in paperback, and I'll sign 'em. Form an orderly queue now, people...

Smash It Up

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

For the first time in my book writing career, I have been censored. And it's not by who you'd think it would be.

Birdkill is now available on all platforms, both ebook and paperback. That's Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, iBooks and all major ebook retailers. From 1 March 2016 the paperback will be in stock at WH Smith in the United Arab Emirates and available on order from any bookshop in the world by quoting ISBN 978-1523986736.

I use a 'multi-publishing platform' called Smashwords to manage the distribution of the ePub book, which avoids having to deal directly with B&N, Apple, Kobo and all the others. Smashwords has always been core to my distribution, offering as it does an alternative to Amazon which, although I am broadly in favour, does tend towards the Evil Empire a tad too much to make one want to wholeheartedly endorse it as a sole platform.

Imagine, then, my horror when Smashwords came back and informed me last night Birdkill had failed its review process. What was the book's cardinal sin? That it makes mention of the Kindle and other publishing platforms. This makes Smashwords' partners 'uncomfortable', apparently. So in order to pass Smashwords' review process, I had to remove the text at the end that tells readers where they can buy my books.

The wicked words in question:

Please do not link or refer to any other digital download source other than Smashwords. Our retail partners don't want to see links to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or mention of the Kindle or Nook.

But hang on a second. That's the content of my book. It's my right to publish what the hell I want, isn't it? Surely that's what all this free speech gobbledegook is about? Who cares what their partners are comfortable with or do or don't 'want to see' or 'mention'? It's a fact the book's available on Kindle and Nook. So you're masking the truth here. It's commercial censorship.

You're insisting I don't mention your rivals in my content. What if I want to have one of my characters enjoying reading a novel on their Kindle? Or having fun shopping on Amazon.com?

Amazon, for all its Dark Empire status, has never for any reason whatsoever asked me to amend the content of one of my books.

The UAE's National Media Council (An 'Islamic' Middle Eastern Arab government 'censoring' my books before they can be printed here in the UAE) has never - despite the books containing plenty of content you'd think they'd find uncomfortable to say the least - asked me to amend the content of one of my books. They have never removed or requested I remove one F, C, drugs or prostitution reference. And the books are liberally laced with those.

It took US 'home of free speech' publishing platform Smashwords - ironically the platform I use to assert my freedom of choice - to insist I amend the content of one of my books. To censor me.

It's an apparently small thing and yet at the same time it's a HUGE thing. And - I would submit - it's not a good thing at all.

Footnote: Just for clarity, we're not talking links here. The offending text in the book was:

Available from Amazon on Kindle and in paperback from Amazon, Book Depository or from your local bookstore on order quoting the book’s ISBN.

Also available as an ebook from iBooks, Barnes & Noble, Kobo and other fine online retailers.

And if you can find the line in Smashwords' TOS that says you can't say Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kindle or Nook in your book's end matter, please do put me right. Because I can't...

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.

Not Posting

Wow. I'm mad busy with the day job like you wouldn't believe and yet I've got a Birdkill to edit in time to get copies over here for the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature on 1 March which might seem like a lifetime away but is, in fact, just over a month. When you're printing books with Createspace and shipping 'em, a month isn't very long. When you have to finish proofreading the book then format it for print, upload it - review and approve the page layout and then order a run of copies, a month is nothing.

And even this post is coming at the expense of editing time.

WH Smith has yet to place their order, which is the only thing stopping me from going mental right now. I'm trying to get the thing ready by the time they do. I'm doing school visits and the like, but right now I've got a work deadline that's massiver than massive Mick McMassive.

I can tell you that Birdkill's a huge departure in some ways, a logical development in others. I can tell you it's got me grinning from ear to ear. I can tell you at least one reader from the LitFest found the book left her feeling violated, which is pretty high praise, as it happens.

Editing it, with this pressure on, is probably the hardest thing I've ever undertaken in my great booky journey. Birdkill was written in six weeks in a huge pressure relief surge after the two years it took to squeeze out A Decent Bomber, and yet it's right. This edit's just a nit-picking exercise, yet I have to do it well which means giving it time, effort and focus.

Tempus bloody fugit, I can tell you...

You can pre-order Birdkill here, by the way.

Content, Themes And The Dream Factory

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I recall part of George Michael's original spat with Sony Music was triggered by his sense of deep outrage at their insistence on referring to his music, his creative output, as 'content'. Railing against what he considered to be this most egregious phrase, our George was clearly onto a loser from the get-go.

Never a great movie buff, I have not disgraced a cinema in many a year, I prefer to watch my films on EK on the basis that a) I wasn't doing anything else for those 120 minutes, just sitting in an aluminium tube five miles up in the stratosphere breathing the foetid air expelled by some 500-odd other carbon-based lifeforms b) it's not costing me Dhs35 c) I can switch off (if not walk out) any time I want. This arrangement suits me fine, given that 99% of the films on offer on Emirates' impressive ICE entertainment system are clearly total drivel. The other 1% turn out to be mostly drivel on viewing. This is not, I hasten to add, because Emirates offers anything other than the brightest, spangliest, newest films out there. Rather, I suspect, it is precisely because they do.

On the flight to Blighty last year, I watched Guy Ritchie's 'Man From UNCLE', which was a stylish, if obvious and stilted, pastiche. There were many visual treats on offer, some annoying split-frame sequences and a exhilarating lack of intelligence, plot, wit and dialogue. This didn't stop the film from being mildly entertaining, a little in the spirit of an indulgent uncle finding the clunky piano playing of a favourite niece entertaining. I must hasten to add that I do not have a piano playing niece. Drums, yes, but the ivories have so far been thankfully untinkled.

I also watched 'Bridge of Spies', a Spielberg classic in which Tom Hanks plays Tom Hanks brilliantly. Mark Rylance puts in a wonderfully understated performance as Scottish-accented Soviet spy Rudolf Abel. There are some obvious bits that make you writhe in your expensive seat and threaten to upset your tray-table, but otherwise the film is a fine entertainment that underscores the obvious fact that our system was so much better than their system and we should Be Thankful For Our Great Democracy and the values we represent which are so much more fundamentally good than the other side's. It takes, of course, Tom Hanks' great humanity to bring this point home because our guys in authority insist on behaving in the same way as their guys  in authority. But I cavil - the film is well worth watching.

On the flight back I was horrified to find, despite it being not only a new month but a new year, the film selection hadn't changed. Having watched the only two films in the whole 70 million item catalogue that didn't look woeful, I was reduced to the prospect of spending eight hours staring at seat back, talking to my wife or something even more terrible. The comedy channel on ICE, incidentally, features no comedy whatsoever unless you are a protozoic life form whose brain has been replaced by expanding foam and who considers the very zenith of humour to be 'Family Guy'. And there's no 'Top Gear', of course. Damn. Not, you understand, that I consider Top Gear to be the best thing since sliced Hovis. It just gives gentlemen of my age hope that they could become rich and famous even this late in the game.

Reduced to sheer desperation, I watched 'Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials'. It might not be called this, but I can't be bothered to Google the title. I'm probably better off not wasting your time in describing the film much at all, really, other than to note that it's utterly shite on every level. There's a great deal of running around, peppered by people shouting 'Come on' and 'Hurry' frequently. There are swathes of rubbishy CGI victims of a virus who have been turned into zombies who screech and vomit black ink for some reason. The love interest looks like an anthropomorphic egg with a wig on and the baddies are called WICKED in case you didn't know they were really bad. I made it through to the end and sat back feeling guilty and abused, a little like that feeling you get when you've eaten a Big Mac.

I tried to watch Mr Holmes, which is about Sherlock Holmes as an old person. He's played by Ian McKellen, who looks a lot like a benign alcoholic tortoise with a very big nose. He's got dementia, which was last years' Great Theme for the entertainment industry. If you'd written a book back then about someone who can't remember things and thinks family members are there when they're not, you'd be quids in, mate. The film starts with a small boy mistaking a wasp for a bee, much to McKellen's dislike as Retired Holmes is, we find out quickly, a bee-keeper. I got to the third episode of forgetfulness and switched off, trying not to feel self-importantly angry because my father died of dementia and I didn't like to see it trivialised. I failed in this.

I also tried to watch 'Mad Max: Fury Road', which didn't go so well. I'm embarrassed to tell you I watched the original Mad Max as a teenager and loved it. It was the film wot launched Mel Gibson's career, a low-budget Australian sci-fi effort which went what I suppose we'd call viral today. Looking back at the original, it's amazing how much impact it had at the time, because it's incredibly clunky and low-key. But I recall how mad and, well, just 'out there' it was. The sequel was equally brilliant, adding a huge amount of pizzaz to the dystopian style of the original. By the time Tina Turna pitched, I'd fallen off the bus: style had eclipsed content and the whole point about the original Mad Max is it was a brilliantly and stylishly told story of brutality and revenge, not just a collection of shinies trotted out like a dumb game show's glittering prizes.

Fury Road isn't even that. It's just lazy, woeful pants. The trouble is, for a work of imagination ('content') to turn into something wonderful, it needs to be anchored in reason. Even dystopia needs reason - the trick, ask William Gibson, is to warp the reason and build tottering towers of suspended disbelief on that twisted logic. There was no reason on offer in this film, just a lazy freak show that reminded me more of Duffo than Gibson's vengeful cop. I got as far as the flying car with four drummers on the back and a CGI bloke playing a flame-shooting flying V on the front bumper before switching off. I was amazed, in retrospect, at my staying power.

I tried not to let myself be plunged into black depression. Looking out at the dawning sun over the dark cloud, I was in awe. So this is the best the Dream Factory can conjure up? The greatest stories mankind can tell itself? It likely is. It's probably my fault. I'm clearly out of step with everyone else.

Thank God for the Kindle. That's all I can say...

Goodbye

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We head hunted him, back in the '80s, either from Alain Charles Publishing or from Middle East Comms magazine. I can't remember which. He was hugely talented and just too happy to be an easy catch. You always look for discontentment when you're poaching people and Dominic appeared far from discontented. Ace ad salesman by day, jazz singer by night. He loved gigging, had a huge voice made for belting out those big Rat Pack numbers. We plotted his acquisition and by chance came across a terrible weakness for BMWs. One red 5 series later and the boy was ours, the new ad manager for Arabian Computer News and Communications Midde East Africa magazines. God help me, but I was his publisher.

Dominic De Souza closed a sale like nobody else I knew, he had a killer instinct for it. One minute you'd be arguing with a marketing manager about why a 6 series of DPSs was the way to go, the next SLAM the guy was signing the order, his eyes all glassy and Dom holding the form straight for him, a manic crocodile grin plastered all over that big face. On our first trip to Saudi together, for some reason best know to himself, he insisted on telling everyone he was Brazilian, although he was brought up in Africa to Goan merchant parents.

When he was a kid in Kenya, some other kids tried to steal his prize kazoo. Dominic rubbed a red chilli on the mouthpiece and let them take it. He had that side to him, had a real mean streak if he thought he was being treated unfairly. And he could be pretty vengeful. Goaded on by his amour at the time, he abandoned his quiet wee wife for an affair with his ad sales exec, he took to demanding raises and more status. He got into the habit of bursting into the office and flinging his BMW keys down in dramatic mock resignations. And then one day, the keys got quietly accepted. He didn't know what to do. It was one of those 'You're not serious' moments. Oh, yes, we are.

I suppose legal reasons would prevent telling the whole sorry tale, but he set up in competition to us and we sued him for stealing our database. It got fairly messy, house arrests in Dubai and the like ensued. Much acrimony followed, quite a lot of recrimination and a lot of rumour and larceny. Out of all this, he founded Dubai based publishing company Corporate Publishing International or CPI as it came to be known. Years later I ran into him late at night and alone, beleaguered and somewhat the worse for wear outside The Lodge (remember the Lodge, folks?), where the bouncer wouldn't let him in because he 'wasn't a member' which translated to 'looked Indian'. It was a ticketed event and I had a spare, which I gave him. The bouncer tore it up in his face and told him to sling his hook in demotic Anglo Saxon. He was like a lost puppy and in that sad, lonely moment, we buried the hatchet.

He used to call Sarah 'Sazzypops'. He laughed like rolling thunder and sang like an angel. He was always running away from himself, launching new escapades and eating life up like a great big life eating thing. The energy was exhausting, his big hands constantly embracing madcap schemes and rescuing lost causes. He never turned his back on someone in need, having been alienated and marginalised himself. He fell in love with Marmosets and suddenly his house, life and conversation were packed with monkeys of every shade and size. His flamboyance was legendary, from a taste in 'purple' suits to announcing to Reuters that he was going to launch a magazine about  dead celebrities called 'Goodbye'. They ran with the story. No sense of humour, journalists.

Latterly, he fell prone to a dicky heart. Last night he was singing at the BBC Good Food Awards and keeled over on stage. Today, he's gone.

The Liberty Bus

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

You know when a day goes to complete ratshit? When you had plans and they gang aft agley? It was that sort of day last Thursday. Scheduled to be in Warqa for festive nibbles with pals, I'm still in the office at six with a drive to Ajman and back ahead of me and every road in Dubai is crimson on Google Maps. The MBZ is just awful, blocked up south of Mirdif.

And so, desperate, I set off to find The Last Snicket, the tiny gap out by the RTA depot in the desert beyond Mizhar that breaches the insane wall of concrete lumps that very transport authority has constructed in the sands that border two parts of the same country.

I don't know what I was thinking. I mean, if I'd sat out the MBZ mess, I'd have been through in 30 minutes. But something in me, the spirit that sets salmon carving their way across the world's oceans to seek a nice, Scottish river to die in, craved freedom. Driving along the sandy track by the barrier in the darkness, I started to doubt myself. Was this really the smart thing to do? Of course it was, I was moving, wasn't I?

The little gap was closed. They've been plugging gaps opening in their barrier daily. And they've gone further out into the remote desert than ever before. You know that feeling when you just have to keep going around the next corner in the wadi to see what's there? Yep, that. I carry on up sandy hill and down bosky dell, finding gap after gap has been plugged with the ground all around churned up by the tractors they've used to pile up great walls of sand to reinforce their barrier. Until I get to The Last Snicket, literally a few hundred yards from the Emirates Road, the E611, in the deep, deep desert.

They've even blocked that, something I discover as I hurl the car over the piles they've made in their blocking frenzy, the Pajero bucking on the rough, soft sand and then lurching down a steep slope into a deep, pitch black bowl. That's when The Fear hit me, the nasty tingle you get when you know something really, really bad's about to happen and you're powerless to stop it. There are two ways out of the bowl, a long slope that appears to have no ending in the darkness and a steep boggy little track out to the right, all churned up and deeply rutted soft sand. I can see very little because my lights are pointed downwards as I slip down the slope. I'm going too slowly, slam my foot down on the throttle and go for the boggy sand, knowing in my heart of hearts I don't have enough speed. Sure enough, half-way up, I dig in and grind to a halt. I reverse to try and regain some momentum to get back up the steep incline I've come down, but it's useless. I stick right there in the cusp of the bowl in the desert blackness.

I say some rude things and then abandon ship. It's too late, too remote and too dark to do anything else. I clamber up the soft dunes and strike out towards the bright lights of the labour camp that sits between the RTA depot and the snaking lights of the 611. Shoes filled with sand, I realise what a spectacle I present when labourers stop to gape at me - a man has walked out of the inky darkness of the desert wearing a blue suit and carrying a laptop bag. I do what any decent Englishman would do and wave, bidding them a cheery 'Good evening'.

I find a gentleman wearing a 'security' uniform. 'Good evening,' I smile. 'Is there any chance I could get a taxi from here?'

He is speechless, but the chap next to him has more presence of mind. 'Where going?' He asks. 'To Sharjah,' I tell him. He grabs my arm and propels me to a nearby bus full of labourers. 'Sharjah, Sharjah, one way!' he shouts at the driver. A jockey seat is put down and patted by a chap in tatty blue overalls. 'Majlis!' he calls out above the coughing engine noise, a broken-toothed grin welcoming me into the fuggy interior. And we set off, some thirty labourers on their way to enjoy a wander around Rolla and me in my blue suit, poker straight and somewhat bewildered, if the truth be told.

We drive up through a track in the darkness, finally breaking out onto the road by the RTA depot and then through Mizhar and Muhaisna. The chaps are nattering away, cheerful and buoyed by the coming weekend. Their chatter is a constant tide of shouts, laughter and tubercular coughing set against the rise and fall of the clanking engine. We hit bad traffic and a moan goes up from the bus, 'Sonapour, Sonapour,' they tut and sigh. It's as if there's nothing good ever to be got from Sonapour, the source of the traffic snarl-up.

They let me off at National Paints and I bid them a cheery, and genuinely thankful, farewell and get a taxi. The taxi driver has clearly never seen a man in a suit get off a labour bus before and it takes me a while before I can get him to listen to where I want to go.

For what it's worth, I eventually made it back down to Warqa only half an hour late.

The next day I went back in the company of pal Derek to see how we could possibly unstick the Paj. It was pretty hopeless, but some tyre letting down and tugging later, we managed to extricate ourselves both from the bowl. And then, because we could, we pootled over the blocked snicket and home to Sharjah.

It's safe to say, though, that my snicketing days are now over. I enjoyed the new experience of the Liberty Bus but honestly don't fancy making a habit of it...