Confessions of a Failed Author #10

Want the good news or the bad news? by Nick van der Leek

The good news is I'm not going to be begging anyone to buy my (well actually 'our') latest Oscar trial ebook, firstly because a bunch of someone's already have bought it (propelling it to #8 on the UK bestseller charts)...

...and secondly because Transcendence contains some very personal stuff that...on second thoughts, I think I'd rather nobody read.  So what I'm saying is yes it's for sale but I'd prefer it if nobody bought it.  If you want to make sure you don't buy Transcendence, whatever you do DO NOT follow this link.  Thanks.

The bad news is...people who do and don't read my magazine articles may not be surprised to learn that I've been writing novels crap since high school, and I'm still going strong. And since failed authors who keep at it don't have that much of a social life (or any kind of life) I've managed to accumulate a fair amount of writing crap.  As I said, it's pretty bad news.

Which is why right now I am ranked #38,393 on Amazon.  In other words, fucking nowhere.  On the plus side, since publishing my first ebook on 6 June I've still only had 3 non-sales days to date (nuts, ne?), which is probably down to some rich tannie in Clocolan who feels sorry for me, and is buying one five a day so I'll be able to buy milk and bread groceries from Woolworths each month. Hey, aunty Stienie or whoever it is buying my books in the name of charity and not because it's any good - I appreciate it ;-)

Now, I have another confession to make.  One of the reason I suck as a writer is...well...I read a lot of self help books.  I mean, how to get published. Failed authors like me spend at least as much time reading about how to write as they do writing. Don't they? And since I've copped out of the proper way of writing books, since I'm too fucking lazy to make a real effort; which is to spend years writing and then several more years trying to get the attention of publishers, I've started pursuing something new:

studying up on ebooks.  

In other words, how to buck the system.  Hence I came upon this excellent Huffington Post article.

10 Steps to Ebook Success

It's all good, but what struck me was point #4:

4. Have more than one ebook already writtenAmanda Hocking, Stephen Leather, John Locke and many of the first wave of self-published eBook millionaires all had a number of titles ready to go at the same time. More ebooks means more chances to sell, and more chances for a reader who likes one of your titles to seek out the rest, thereby multiplying your revenues. "Having five books available at the same time is probably the best thing I did," said Locke in The Mail On Sunday. 

In fellow ebook novelist Joe Konrath's case, in January of this year he posted on his blog that he'd banked a cool $100,000 in Amazon sales for that month alone -- but this was from a total of FIFTEEN ebooks. Writing three or more ebooks before you even think about publishing is a mammoth task, which requires ninja-like patience, perseverance and planning. Most self-publishers are too eager to get their stuff out there, and so they publish too fast and without any strategy. Better to carefully plan your sequence of titles, and to take the time to write well.

Since I like that number [15] referenced in the article, I thought I might as well add 7 more fiction books to the 6 Oscar Trial ebooks already selling on Amazon (plus two more in the series on the way - once again collaborating with Lisa Wilson) and that way I can sort've get the same magic number.  Since I realise I'm a vrot writer, I reckon I ought to make $100 000  somewhere in the ballpark of R1000.00 a month - well, just as long as that Clocolan auntie keeps bankrolling me at 5 2 ebooks per day.  [R15 profit per book X 2 books x 30 days...= R1000]

I realise most people out there want to not buy my books, so in that spirit I've released this work of fact sort've-fiction. This is Book #7 and it's already available on Amazon; it's something I believe I wrote in 2009. Hey, WTF I write a shitload, don't expect me to remember exactly what I wrote when, kay?   

I have 4 more finished fiction works waiting in the wings but I want to wait a leetle longer just to see how well HOLIDAY does, and see how well it's received in the first reviews.  On debut (basically within a day of putting it up) three idiots actually spent good money on it.

Right now I am actually converting BLOODLINE - the 25 year unpublished epic that I promise I will NEVER finish - for the ebook crowd, which is to say I'm shortening the chapters and trying to trim it down from 175 000 words to 150 000.  If I'm in a foul mood I may just surgically remove another 50 000 just to be brutal. Hey, leave me alone, I'm a writer and I'm into self harm okay, it's my thing.

Meanwhile, what do you think of these covers?

 This should actually read 'the uninspiring satire' of a man's journey into SA's mad media world.

 Yeah, I get that this is the sun and not the moon, but hey, I'm a failed author, I'm supposed to make simple mistakes like that...

Awwwwwwwwwwwww.........And Last but not least...

Bloodline.  Been working on this series for a good long while. Bloodline, a series of 7 books,  is already available for purchase...here.

You know, now that I think about it, I've spent so much time on this Amazon lark I seem to have copped out of magazine journalism too - well, not quite.  I did just sent through a 2000 word article last night...which is being processed for publication like...now.  And ironically, or is it, not ironically, it's an article about print vs digital publishing. Ie paper books vs ebooks.

Okay well I guess that about wraps it up for this installment. If you feel like torturing yourself with diarrhea-inducing bad writing, and an argument can be made that there's even a touch of cradle snatching going on here, then go ahead, read HOLIDAY.  Or Bloodline. But don't say I didn't warn you.

Oprah Interview With Cormac McCarthy (VIDEO)

I read 'The Road' and was inspired pretty early on to write two books of my own, one, HOLIDAY (published on this blog) and another that I'm still working on, called FIRE, ICE AND THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD. Click on the tags below this post to link to those posts on this blog.

HarperCollins Will Post Free Books on the Web

In an attempt to increase book sales, HarperCollins Publishers will begin offering free electronic editions of some of its books on its Web site, including a novel by Paulo Coelho and a cookbook by the Food Network star Robert Irvine.

The idea is to give readers the opportunity to sample the books online in the same way that prospective buyers can flip through books in a bookstore.

“It’s like taking the shrink wrap off a book,” said Jane Friedman, chief executive of HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide. “The best way to sell books is to have the consumer be able to read some of that content.”

More.

NVDL: Agg...I did that ages ago ;-). Click on the tag HOLIDAY (below).

In 2008, a 100 Percent Chance of Alarm

I’d like to wish you a happy New Year, but I’m afraid I have a different sort of prediction.

You’re in for very bad weather. In 2008, your television will bring you image after frightening image of natural havoc linked to global warming. You will be told that such bizarre weather must be a sign of dangerous climate change — and that these images are a mere preview of what’s in store unless we act quickly to cool the planet.

Unfortunately, I can’t be more specific. I don’t know if disaster will come by flood or drought, hurricane or blizzard, fire or ice [The name of the book I am working on now: Fire, Ice and the Whole Wide World]. Nor do I have any idea how much the planet will warm this year or what that means for your local forecast. Long-term climate models cannot explain short-term weather.

But there’s bound to be some weird weather somewhere, and we will react like the sailors in the Book of Jonah. When a storm hit their ship, they didn’t ascribe it to a seasonal weather pattern. They quickly identified the cause (Jonah’s sinfulness) and agreed to an appropriate policy response (throw Jonah overboard).

Today’s interpreters of the weather are what social scientists call availability entrepreneurs: the activists, journalists and publicity-savvy scientists who selectively monitor the globe looking for newsworthy evidence of a new form of sinfulness, burning fossil fuels.

A year ago, British meteorologists made headlines predicting that the buildup of greenhouse gases would help make 2007 the hottest year on record. At year’s end, even though the British scientists reported the global temperature average was not a new record — it was actually lower than any year since 2001 — the BBC confidently proclaimed, “2007 Data Confirms Warming Trend.”

When the Arctic sea ice last year hit the lowest level ever recorded by satellites, it was big news and heralded as a sign that the whole planet was warming. When the Antarctic sea ice last year reached the highest level ever recorded by satellites, it was pretty much ignored. A large part of Antarctica has been cooling recently, but most coverage of that continent has focused on one small part that has warmed.

When Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans in 2005, it was supposed to be a harbinger of the stormier world predicted by some climate modelers. When the next two hurricane seasons were fairly calm — by some measures, last season in the Northern Hemisphere was the calmest in three decades — the availability entrepreneurs changed the subject. Droughts in California and Australia became the new harbingers of climate change (never mind that a warmer planet is projected to have more, not less, precipitation over all).

The most charitable excuse for this bias in weather divination is that the entrepreneurs are trying to offset another bias. The planet has indeed gotten warmer, and it is projected to keep warming because of greenhouse emissions, but this process is too slow to make much impact on the public.

When judging risks, we often go wrong by using what’s called the availability heuristic: we gauge a danger according to how many examples of it are readily available in our minds. Thus we overestimate the odds of dying in a terrorist attack or a plane crash because we’ve seen such dramatic deaths so often on television; we underestimate the risks of dying from a stroke because we don’t have so many vivid images readily available.

Slow warming doesn’t make for memorable images on television or in people’s minds, so activists, journalists and scientists have looked to hurricanes, wild fires and starving polar bears instead. They have used these images to start an “availability cascade,” a term coined by Timur Kuran, a professor of economics and law at the University of Southern California, and Cass R. Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago.

The availability cascade is a self-perpetuating process: the more attention a danger gets, the more worried people become, leading to more news coverage and more fear. Once the images of Sept. 11 made terrorism seem a major threat, the press and the police lavished attention on potential new attacks and supposed plots. After Three Mile Island and “The China Syndrome,” minor malfunctions at nuclear power plants suddenly became newsworthy.

“Many people concerned about climate change,” Dr. Sunstein says, “want to create an availability cascade by fixing an incident in people’s minds. Hurricane Katrina is just an early example; there will be others. I don’t doubt that climate change is real and that it presents a serious threat, but there’s a danger that any ‘consensus’ on particular events or specific findings is, in part, a cascade.”

Once a cascade is under way, it becomes tough to sort out risks because experts become reluctant to dispute the popular wisdom, and are ignored if they do. Now that the melting Arctic has become the symbol of global warming, there’s not much interest in hearing other explanations of why the ice is melting — or why the globe’s other pole isn’t melting, too.

Global warming has an impact on both polar regions, but they’re also strongly influenced by regional weather patterns and ocean currents. Two studies by NASA and university scientists last year concluded that much of the recent melting of Arctic sea ice was related to a cyclical change in ocean currents and winds, but those studies got relatively little attention — and were certainly no match for the images of struggling polar bears so popular with availability entrepreneurs.

Roger A. Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, recently noted the very different reception received last year by two conflicting papers on the link between hurricanes and global warming. He counted 79 news articles about a paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, and only 3 news articles about one in a far more prestigious journal, Nature.
Guess which paper jibed with the theory — and image of Katrina — presented by Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth”?

It was, of course, the paper in the more obscure journal, which suggested that global warming is creating more hurricanes. The paper in Nature concluded that global warming has a minimal effect on hurricanes. It was published in December — by coincidence, the same week that Mr. Gore received his Nobel Peace Prize.

In his acceptance speech, Mr. Gore didn’t dwell on the complexities of the hurricane debate. Nor, in his roundup of the 2007 weather, did he mention how calm the hurricane season had been. Instead, he alluded somewhat mysteriously to “stronger storms in the Atlantic and Pacific,” and focused on other kinds of disasters, like “massive droughts” and “massive flooding.”
“In the last few months,” Mr. Gore said, “it has been harder and harder to misinterpret the signs that our world is spinning out of kilter.” But he was being too modest. Thanks to availability entrepreneurs like him, misinterpreting the weather is getting easier and easier.

From The New York Times

By JOHN TIERNEY
Published: January 1, 2008

More:
"2007 to Be 'Warmest on Record.'"
"2007 Data Confirms Warming Trend."

NVDL: I don't particularly like this sort of article, as its message is essentially: I know for a fact that we don't know what's going on. Thus, it sows uncertainty. It is true that we can't be certain exactly what is going on with the weather. But is that uncertainty a license to continue to perpetrate warming using old technology just because we want to and because it is convenient? The last decade has been the warmest on record, with the most catastrophic storms on record. The trend will continue into the following decade. When do we go: 'Oh, I think things have changed. Now we need to do things differently.'

HOLIDAY is exactly about this myopia. The characters keep asking themselves: 'do you think something is happening; is this global warming?' It is based on passive observation of the environment from the perspective of our being disconnected from it. It is when we are part of the world, that we can participate in the possible resurrection of our world and ourselves.

Long, Dull, Boring, Whacko, Wake Up Weekend

What not to do and what to do to make the most of your holiday break

The good thing about having wasted so much time this weekend is the dissatisfaction serves as a reminder for what not to do when I go on holiday (quite soon). Hence here are the rules:
1) No computer games
2) No sleeping late
3) No promises to go to gym - just go
4) Forget trying to get the pool clean - go and swim somewhere else (it's too late now)
5) Make sure you've made plans with people beforehand. 5 minutes is not sufficient lead up to do a weekend trip
6) Effort - not laziness - will be rewarded
7) No DVD's

And to do:

1) Read
2) Spend time with friends and family
3) Get outside, into a new environment
4) Catch a tan - sunshine is happiness
5) Be active, and put it in an effort. Help out around the house
6) Explore
7) Experience and enjoy (absorb)

Holiday Road

NVDL: Below is the final paragraph of Cormac McCarthy's post apocalyptic novel, The Road. It was while reading this book that I was inspired to write HOLIDAY, a far less gloomuy, brighter, more tropical version that explores the theme of global disintegration/collapse and our human response to it ('Is it really happening...?')

"Once there were brook trouts in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery."

He is talking about the post apocalyptical world here. ONCE there were fish in the very mountains where this father and son crossed to get to the sea. But no longer. And things will never be put back right again. In the deep glens where the fish lived, all things were older than man. But yet man - the newcomer on Earth - the last to arrive here - is the one who ends up taking control and eventually destroying the planet. And it can never be made right again. Because the conditions that existed in the beginning when man evolved from the sea will never exist again.

This is a warning. This is the point of the book. This is a work of speculative fiction. It is taking a situation in the present and projecting it into the future. He is saying that if man continues on his present course, this will happen. But you will notice he is very careful never to actually tell you what happens that kills the majority of the people on earth. We only know that something happened and happened fast and simultaneously all over the world. You can really make one of two choices. Either man destroys itself through bombs or pollution. Take your pick. The result is the same. Once we destroy the world, we can never get it back again.

From Yahoo.com

Zebra Press on HOLIDAY

Dear Mr. van der Leek

PUBLICATION OF NOVEL

Your proposal has been discussed with our publishing committee and it is with regret that I advise that the above title does not fit into the Zebra Press publishing programme.

We thank you for your interest in our company and wish you every success with this venture.

Yours sincerely,
KT

NVDL: Very quick turnaround. I emailed them late yesterday afternoon. Guess I'll have to bin my oscar speech. Meanwhile - quite humbling - this blog has avalanched to 205th spot on Amatomu's blog charts (at one point it was in the 60's). Worryingly, Peas On Toast is at 49th spot.

Here's a quote from Mushy peas on Toast (Ranked 49th SA Blog):

See, I bought a series of new underwear pieces last week. The favourite – an electric turquoise lace number – I put on that morning. And unwittingly walking around in them, jean pant chafing at my nethers – turned out to itch the fuck out of me in the gallery.

Not a little itch that could be ignored. No. It was like a ladle of itchy powder in my lingerie. New lace, not good.

I'm not sure being a success in the conventional sense of the word is anything to crow about. To be successful, in the Mushy, Donald Trump, Jenna Jameson, Mugabe-George Bush sense of the word seems to be manipulating, conniving, pornographising or otherwise bullshitting your way to the top. I respect the likes of Lance, Branson and Oprah - those who define themselves through a sense of identity, values, work ethic, discipline and commitment.

A View From The Couch

Last night I slept on the couch, and thus woke up this morning 5 metres closer to my bicycle. I expected rain but as usual, the air was dry as a cork and so by 5am I was out the door. Was a pretty nice ride against the backdrop of an oily, visceral dawn. The sort of thing my brother paints in his boompie bergie huise Western Cape landscapes.

Phedra Cut is definitely working it's magic, and the side-effects are also becoming increasingly obvious. I feel jittery and irritable, and am able to hit much higher heart rates during training (up about 10). On Sunday I hit 174, which is 10 beats above my maximum in the 94.7. That's er...A LOT.

Ryk Neethling, I'm told, has flown to Durban on some charity mission on behalf of Madiba. He has injured his shoulder and may require surgery, although it seems that is no longer on the cards - or at least - not as on the cards as it was a few days ago.

I've submitted HOLIDAY today to ZEBRA Press, another Struik imprint. See how that goes. Meanwhile I am looking forward to Friday and the weekend:
Friday: The Golden Compass opens.
Weekend: Gauteng swimming champs and a triathlon.

Human & Rousseau Review of My Book - HOLIDAY

Holiday is a weird piece of writing.

NVDL: You mean sexy weird, or weird as in Marilyn Manson + Whacko Jacko.

Initially I was struck by the idea that this was a kind of apocalyptic version of The Beach.

NVDL: Pity you weren’t struck by a bolt of lightning.

This idea was built on the first few pages of this manuscript where I could detect something of Alex Garland in the author’s style, but, perhaps more than that, in his choice of setting for this novel.

NVDL: Are you a detective? So you’re saying because this story is set in the Far East, in the Philippines, it’s interchangeable with the only other novel you have ever read, set in Thailand? Do you ever get out of the house? My guess is you wouldn’t detect a fly even if it flew straight into your eye.

Garland has written quite extensively about Southeast Asia-

NVDL: Did he write anything beyond The Beach that was set in Southeast Asia?

-but in essence this work boils down to a succession of sweaty, run down hotel rooms with fans that don’t work properly.

NVDL: It’s a nice bunch of words to string together, but actually that’s not even close to what HOLIDAY is about. It’s about Climate Change. That’s the backdrop. Interesting that you didn’t detect that, but instead focused on interior decorations. Probably reflects the extent to which you remain indoors, contemplating your own dismal surrounds, and finding yourself utterly bored beyond belief and unable to produce anything of merit yourself.

As I started to read HOLIDAY I was struck by a certain kind of kinship with this kind of post-Apocalypse Now vision.

NVDL: Jeepers. Are you able to stick to the actual work at hand, or is something always a reflection of something else? Can you see something for what it is, or does it have to be judged in comparison to a hierarchy of your own selected works. Doesn’t say much already for your ability to think fresh thoughts.

However, as I read further this kindship rapidly dimished until there was little if anything of it left.

NVDL: That’s because HOLIDAY is initially and intentionally set in a reality that you might be able to identify with, i.e. one that is familiar. From there it takes you into an environment you’re not familiar with. Quite a few stories work this way, but you probably wouldn’t know that.

This is, in my opinion, due to the nature of the story that the author is trying to tell in this manuscript.

NVDL: Ya think?

The story is one of global catastrophe and this of course overrides any other stories to do with human relationships or hotel rooms, sweaty or otherwise.

NVDL: You got the a third of your information right in that sentence. You’re saying stories about global catastrophe somehow earn a license to break away from other formulaic stories? You’re really stuck on formula aren’t you? Possibly, you’re on anti-depressants and any departure from what you perceive in your microcosm of existence petrifies you.

So, an Alex Garland-esque disaster thriller, what more could we ask for? Well, quite a lot actually.

NVDL: This should be good.

As I mentioned above this manuscript fragments after its initial impact and ‘fragmented’ is a good general description for this manuscript.

NVDL: That’s sort of what happens when the world comes to an end. The centre cannot hold and things fall apart. You don’t tell a story about breakdown from a vantage point of complete access to information, and physical integrity. I’ve considered asking printers to approximate burnt pages, oil smears and water drops mixing with ink, to further promote this idea of disintegration. The point is, you appear too STOOOOPID to see that this fragmenting of the story is a metaphor for the story itself. KOO KOOOO!

There are great general descriptions of the Philippines and some good plot development, but the novel doesn’t hold together and the reason it doesn’t hold together is because it lacks the emotional investment and imaginative creativity necessary to make it work as a piece of fiction.

NVDL: So you initially criticize this for being too creative for a formula you had in mind, now it’s not creative enough? It lacks emotional investment? Have you heard of understatement as a technique to elicit emotion? The whole idea is to present a gray area and not have the characters solve the problems for the reader. The reader is faced with these problems, and is asked to consider a solution. So the lack of investment appears to come from your brain, and I’d diagnose a certain amount of schizophrenia here, disguised as ‘academia’.

There is no doubt in my mind that this author can write (and his covering letter shows that he has been published in various magazines), but writing fiction requires emotional intelligence that journalism does not.

NVDL: This is priceless! Now I’m accused of being a journalist. And you imply I am an author already? I think I need to pass on Human & Rousseau altogether if this is the sort of mindrotted moron you employ to do your reading.

This is what is lacking from this manuscript and this is why it will continue not to work. I would suggest that the author revisit the work that made him want to become a novelist and learn all he can from it.

NVDL: Thanks guy. If you don’t mind, I am now going to bin your letter. My suggestion is that you do a treatise on Harry Potter or Winnie the Pooh. Start off by giving all the reasons you wouldn’t publish it, thereby echoing the hollow, mindless clatter that so many unimaginative, uninspired souls have produced over the ages. Join the throng of the wrong. And then ask yourself how much those reasons you hold so dear, how much do they really matter. What does matter? An imaginative story; a fresh approach.

Unfortunately, I see a rather old human being, if not in years, then in the sense of too little butter spread over too much bread. I see someone pretending to have a sensible view, when all they really know is the inside of a library, the bottom of a whiskey glass, the feeling of a cigarette butt between their fingertips. You’re unable to know anything for what it is, probably because you are not an identifiable being yourself, but someone who drifts, who voyeurs on the hopes and dreams and musings of others. As such, having learnt nothing from life (or even how to think about it), do yourself and everyone around you a favor: get busy living, or shut the hell up.

North Sea surge brings flood risk (BBC NEWS)

A storm in the North Sea has left Britain and the Netherlands facing the worst flood threat in decades with tidal surges predicted early on Friday.

Flood defences have been put on alert on the entire Dutch coast and flood warnings are in place for the eastern and northern coasts of Britain.

A tidal wave in 1953 killed more than 2,000 people in both countries.

Parts of UK struck by tornadoes
Thousands evacuated in flood zone
New insect species arrives in UK


Oil platforms have been closed off the Norwegian coast and gales are expected in Germany and Denmark.

The Dutch transport ministry said this was the first time since 1976 the whole North Sea coast was under alert.

Maritime traffic in Rotterdam was halted, as the authorities closed the giant Maeslant barrier that guards entrance to the largest port in Europe for the first time since its construction in the 1990s.

It took half-an-hour for the two doors of the barrier across the Nieuwe Waterweg to meet, spanning a channel 360 metres wide.

Rotterdam will remain closed until 1700GMT on Friday, a port spokesman said.

One-third of the land mass of the Netherlands is under sea level.

Flood warnings

In Britain, the Thames River and Dartford Creek barriers are being shut as waters are forecast to surge 1.5 metres (5 feet) above normal sea levels.

Families along the Norfolk coast have been protecting their homes

UK government warned large areas of Norfolk and Kent coasts were at risk of severe flooding and the Met Office warned of gusts of up to 145km/h (90mph) for the Orkney and Shetland islands in Scotland.
The storm surge is expected to peak around dawn on Friday, and several hundred people have left their homes near Great Yarmouth in Norfolk.

Severe gale warnings were issued in Germany and Denmark, with wind gusts of up to 125km/h (80mph) expected.

In Germany, regions around the Elbe and Elm rivers were under flood warnings.

The North Sea storm affected oil industry in Norway, the fifth largest exporter of crude in the world, with the closure of oil platforms off its coast.

Norway's oil production of 220,000 barrels per day is expected to be slashed by 10% possibly leading to increases in the price of crude, already at record levels, experts say.

NVDL: The UK is basically the world's canary in terms of climate change. It has thrived so far thanks to an exceptional belt of warming water being diverted towards its shores - we all know the schpiel. We know that polar melt will shut it down. Since ice sheets the size of South Africa (or Texas and California combined) have melted and not frozen back, it's logical to assume that it is only a question of time before the British Isles reverts to a more Ice Age type of climate. That said, perhaps we will first see a temporary phase of extraordinary warming, as we are seeing in Canada, and extreme storms, as is also the case in Canada (spewing tornadoes and the like).

Once again we have this apparently unique situation where the world's weather has an impaqct on global fuel prices, and that has an effect on every person. The next time you catch yourself wondering where you fit in, in all this, remember that every time you drive your car, you and everyone else is doing your bit to inject energy (heat) into the atmosphere. We're now at a point where there is so much energy in the atmosphere, that extreme weather becomes the convention.

Yesterday I submitted HOLIDAY to PanMacMillan. It's obviously encouraging to hear that one person who read my book, then read it again 3 times. Another woman who read it had nightmares. A teenager read it within 2-3 days. It basically paints a picture of living in the world where weather patterns have gone beyond tipping point, and we see the atmosphere basically transitioning into a slow chemical reaction.

Publisher: WE LOVE YOUR BOOK!

Dear Nick

It is exceedingly rare that we write the letter you are holding in your hands. In fact it is fair to say this happens around once or twice a year. We were at first pleased and interested in your mansucript, and then absolutely rivetted. Excellent prose, awesome plot, and such a relevant topic too. Being a fairly short story, I handed it to the Editor and other colleagues, all of whom stayed up the whole night reading HOLIDAY.

At this point we would like to offer you a contract, and request your permission to submit a copy for re-scripting to the Writer's Guild of America. In this way we can get it submitted to a Hollywood Studio. We would really blah blah blah, ya da ya da ya da...

The actual Email goes like this:

Dear Nick

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to J Media.

Although your manuscript is intelligent and well-written, it does not fit in with our publishing strategy at present. We recommend that you consult the Publishers' Association of South Africa (PASA) at www.publishsa.co.za, if you have not already done so.

Best of luck with your endeavours!

Yours sincerely
CL

I almost got suckered by 'intelligent and well'written'. They [publishers] say that to everyone, don't they.

Meanwhile the above image reminds me of the novel I wrote while in South Korea (yearning for South Africa): HALF FULL MOON. It's the adventure of a helicopter pilot who starts off fighting these urban threatening infernos; and accidently scoops up a shallow diver in the orange bambi dangling under the helicopter, and tosses him into hellfire. And so ends that chapter of his life.

He - Andy Snook - finds it hard to live with himself after that, and soon after gets helicopter-wrecked in the Kalahari, where a Bushman finds him, and guides him back to the 'Desert of the real', the now. He also meets the desert dragon; a spiritual entity called Alcala who reminds him that there is not one world, but two. In this existentialist realm he find himself, and through his journey - his redemption - we sees ourselves, mankind, redeemed.

Climate Change For Dummies (SHORT FILM)

In the past 2 years an ice mass larger than the entire land area of South Africa (that's 1.22 million km²), which is also an area 5 times greater than Great Britain (241,590km²) has melted. This staggering statistic coincides with an incredible accelaration in CO2 levels over the past 2 decades, and we naturally see a concomitant warming that has also accelarated (doubled) in the Arctic in particular since 2000.

This is a single statistic. What's happening is warming at the much higher latitudes is much greater, but these areas are sparsely populated, or populated by people who do not conventionally have laptops, emails or cellphones. The exception is Norway. And it's out of Norway that we learn that the 'skiing season' has halved. Perversely, Norway is embracing climate change, as warming there allows for a more amenable climate.

But the overall result is that alarm bells aren't ringing. And so it may seem for someone in an office in New York, or Amsterdam, or Hong Kong, at the lower latitudes, that things - if (the idiots still say) they - are changing, are doing so incrementally, 'if' at all. Not true. The AVERAGE temperature change in high latitudes like Norway are already in the double digits.

Jorgen Randers (author of LIMITS TO GROWTH, 1972): Norway is a country where the elite is concerned about climate change, and people are not at all concerned about climate change.

Let's be clear: when we say temperature change we're really saying temperature INCREASE.

So Norway for one is experiencing 12 degree Celcius higher AVERAGE temperatures. Since the warming is on a slight lag to CO2, and CO2 emissions are staggeringly high, we can anticipate a long sustained period of warming. The crucial question to ask is this one: since warming has started, year on year, when will we see the first year when warming may level off?

The last decade and a little more have shown the warmest years on record. The next decade will top that, and the decade after that. But there are still plenty of stupid human beings, perhaps still a majority, who can't do the math.

For an excellent short movie giving backdround to this topic, go here. For an excellent article/interview on Jorgen Randers speaking about Norway and Climate Change, go here.

NVDL: I've also written a fictional account [HOLIDAY], a hardcore version of climate change beyond tipping point. I wrote it with the intention to overemphasise the threat. Now I am beginning to wonder whether it can be overemphasised. To read Holiday, click on the HOLIDAY tag below.

HOLIDAY rejected Yet Again

NVDL: BTW I am not considering the self publishing route for HOLIDAY. I’ve provided at least 6 individuals with copies of this manuscript. All feedback so far has been overwhelmingly positive. An avid reader in her late 70’s said she read it twice. An acquaintance who works at SABC has recommended I send it to Hollywood as a script. It’s an important, compelling story, and – I feel – way overdue.

‘Holiday’ is a topical account of the human condition. It presents two characters, a middle-aged man and a young teenager – a girl – who find themselves propelled into an austere, warming world that has gone rapidly beyond the ‘tipping point’.

The story challenges the reader to establish what is real and urgent, and what must be done when the world and all information becomes essentially an ill-defined ‘gray area’. Without rules and regulations, without obvious patterns (in the weather and other areas), Hugh and Stella must decide what to make of themselves and the world.

In the end, everything is stripped away, the world is burnt black, and the only color, the only life that remains, is in these two surviving characters. ‘Holiday’ is a story filled with metaphor, and the metaphor is ironic: for we are not on holiday, there is plenty to do in a world that is increasingly hostile towards its human inhabitants.

Comment on 'HOLIDAY'

Read your book through the night recently but left the last couple of chapters for later as was subjected to symptoms of looming panic attack! Dreamt of doom & gloom & all sorts of associated nasties, so I guess the positive spin is that it's not lacking in impact! The Amazing Race without the glitz...

Dear Nick

Thanks for sending us the sample chapters of your novel. I can see why your readers react as they do – this is, indeed, the stuff of a drama, i.e an exploration of a situation (rather than a novel?) and of Hollywood.

We feel that it would be better promoted in the international market than in our relatively small local market, despite the South African component. This will, probably, require the services of an agent – there is a list in the Writers and Artists Handbook, available at bookshops.

Regretfully, I must decline HOLIDAY for publication by Umuzi. Another South African publisher may feel quite differently, however. So, don’t give up.

Best wishes
X

Tel.+27 (0)21 425 4071 Fax +27 (0)21 425 9470
http://www.umuzi-randomhouse.co.za/
Street address: 14th floor, 22 Riebeek Street, Cape Town 2001
Postal address: P O Box 6810, Roggebaai 8012
(Umuzi is the South African imprint of Random House (Pty) Ltd)

Holiday

Part 1
Forewarning

I've watched the stars fall silent from your eyes - R.E.M. - The Great Beyond

One
Manila

An incinerating moth caught in the exhaust plume glimpsed the ink black jet dancing demonically against the cigarette sky. Even as the burnt flakes of the moth eviscerated into the jet stream, the perpetrator continued to press a cold hard body against the smoky air. Far, far below its belly, a wide wave of foam crushed over a sugary shore.

The dark dragon roared over more waters, the sky around it transforming from stained tobacco yellow to the color purple. Running along the inside of the dragon’s purple painted spine was an echelon of people, something like cyclists seen from above in a cycling race, except they had nothing of the organic nature of the peloton. The holidaymakers had placed themselves with machine like precision in columns and rows, like numbers on a spreadsheet. Most of these numbers were asleep. Some were reading, but in Hugh’s case, writing.

Hugh closed the lid of light, and as he did the peppermint blue was extinguished. The passenger beside him opened an eye as the notebook clicked, then closed it to the airplane’s hollow sounding darkness.

A child could have drawn the deep gashes in Hugh’s forehead. His clenched hands pushed down on the computer’s ceiling. His eyes were closed, but not in an attitude of sleep, such as the Asian man beside him. They were pinched shut. Hugh’s thoughts had focused his face into its present consternation. And his thoughts were the clanging symbols of futility. He had, you see, on a whim decided to open a document he’d been polishing for several years, and after a few final flourishes and finishing touches, he had fiddled and fussed, and somehow lost it all. Now, with the edge of the Philippine’s dark archipelago crawling under the ailerons of the Asiana Airlines Boeing, and his two weeks holiday about to start, his entire being ached with pain and futility. The consequence of confirming to overwrite the file had meant he had lost the original. And with that loss, all the sacrifices, backaches, arguments – the entire retrospective – now amounted to nothing.

For more, click here.