Hi Isobel
Carle kindly provided me with your details. When I was in London I seem to remember submitting an experimental piece (based entirely on emails) to Blake Friedmann. That was called The Sun Is Shining.
I've included something else here, Half Full Moon, which is a spiritual/existential piece that takes the central character, Andy Snook, on an exploration into the power of 'the now' and into the 'desert of the real. It's no coincidence that it's set in a desert (a Thirstland* actually), and one of its main characters is a deitish (is there such a word? if not then 'deity-like') creature called Alcala. It is through her that I communicate a sense of God, not as external to life and history, but part of man and his environment.
I've enclosed a one page synopsis and a lightly illustrated first three chapters.
Here's some background about me:
I've only recently concentrated on writing for a living, and have had some early success with a number of magazine publications, including Heartland (7 published articles including a feature article), Shape and go! magazine.
A website for citizen reporters (www.reporter.co.za) has also selected me to represent them at a New Media conference at Rhodes University in mid-September.
I have a another very short novel (Heaven Can Wait, which is Lovely Bonesy: about a dead mother who visits her son as a ghost) ready for publication, and two others in the works: The Great Castle, which predicts the future of the world without oil, and a gritty, Douglas Couplandy memoir about modern realities, called Pop Goes the Weasel.
Meanwhile I hope you'll read Half Full Moon, and look forward to your impressions
Kind regards
Nick
*A desert is a scientific term for an area that gets a certain minum amount of rainful. The Kalahari Thirstland is not a true desert since it gets that extra sprinkling of rain.
Half Full Moon Synopsis
Andy Snook is a helicopter pilot who finds himself stranded in the Kalahari desert of Botswana, because, apparently, a grain of sand has broken his machine. The first chapter is narrated in the third person. This narrative technique is used to demonstrate how the protagonist leaves his indirect experience of life (throughout secondhand experiences and his experience of the artifices of the modern world) and enters ‘The Now’, or ‘the desert of the real’. This occurs at the end of the difficult transformations built into the first chapter.
It occurs to him, that he is not a third person, but a first person. He is I.
After only a short time in the desert, Andy Snook (an ostensibly wealthy person) encounters his opposite, naked, burnt and wrinkled by the sun, and evidently poor. This Bushman (Rraditshipi) guides him to the safety of an ‘island’ which is basically a prehistoric site of large boulders and Baobabs rising over the sea of the white, moonlike soil that is the Makgadikgadi Pan.. There he encounters other ‘stranded’ survivors – who represent the (shipwrecked) human condition in its various guises – masculine, sensitive, aggressive, ignorant and confused. All these personas encounter Alcala, an otherworldly, overtly feminine presence, a figure with oily hair and faintly Oriental features. She acts as the conscience of this group (and thus the world) and who, though seeking rescue, are made aware of the plight of ‘these people’, the stick like figures who have materialized out of the desert and rescued them.
It is while on walkabout in the desert that the group becomes aware of what the Bushman is up against. The local authorities arrive in a 4x4 and, ignoring the group, immediately seize the Bushman, accusing him of the attack/murder of Snook. When the Bushman responds, he is shot on the spot and falls dead, in the dust. This confirms Alcala’s appeals against man’s inhumanity to man in the Kalahari Thirstland.
As a result the derelict craft (Snook’s helicopter) is resurrected, and two missions are undertaken. The first is to infiltrate the inner sanctum of the mine, at Orapa, and procure incriminating documents which can then be used into a PR campaign against Debswana (the primary persecutors of the Bushman). This is what Alcala calls ‘acting against the Empire’. The second mission is more direct, and concludes the novel. It starts where all individuals finally come together to contribute in their various capacities towards the rescue of what remains of the dwindling humanity (of the Bushman) scattered in the desert. This is suggested through the bambi (an orange balloon like structure capable of holding many tons of water, and used primarily in firefighting) which is raised in the final chapter, and floats under the giant helicopter into the heat of the desert, in search of surviving Bushman.*
It’s a suggestive, existentialist story where not much happens externally, but much transformation takes place inwardly.
*Because the Botswana government has tried to evict the Bushman, the few sources of water in the desert have been covered in concrete or rendered unusable to discourage the resettlement of desperate vagrants.
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