Climbing Hebog

The view on the right is of the village of Beddgelert in Snowdonia, Wales taken from near the postion I am, precariously on the left.

 We think the mountain in the distance is Moel Siabod – a favourite I used to go with Bryan Stevens from Queens Park High School with Duke of Edinburgh students in training. I am very pleased with myself. With the help of John Marchant I climbed over 2,500 feet into the sky in search of the summit of Moel Hebog near Beddgelert in Snowdonia. There is nothing as exhilirating as pushing my unfit body to its limits and standing at the top of a mountain. Excellent. My friend, John, took this photograph of a particularly tricky bit – hence the redness of my face all aglow with the excitement! John tells me the climb was a grade 3 and the edge we ascended in this photo was Reddllen Buttress. Yeay!

Pick a pocket or two

Firstly, on my return from a welcome warm and ebullient trip to Sunny Costa del Sol in Spain, I found my local newspaper, Chester Evening Leader had published a piece about me and daughter traipsing across to Groningen last month to receive my unpublished novel award for Hot Air. The write up and photo is here. You can just see my living room in the background, so maybe a welcome distraction from my silly smiley mugshot. One US friend says his Internet system cannot see the article whereas others abroad can – so let me know if your country or ISP has blocked it. Same seems to be true for BBC news links, which is a shame since we, in the UK, can see CNN.

To explain the heading of this blog I was pickpocketed at the central bus station in Fuengirola! But I nabbed him – haha! The Spanish don’t seem as fond of orderly queues as us Brits so it was no surprise to find body contact in the mob attempting entry onto the 22o to Marbella bendy bus. I was perturbed, however, when the 60+ years-old bewhiskered bloke to my left and rear kept brushing his bare arm next to mine after I’d shuffled twice away from him. Then the distant cracked alarm bell clunked in my head so I put down my hand and found my pocket contained an extra lump. The thief might have watched me use my small wallet at the ticket office five minutes earlier, but I thought I was relatively safe because I’d replaced the wallet into my zipped pocket. He must have had at least two attempts, one to unzip and then to dive in. Anyway I gripped his wrist with my left hand, checked my wallet was still a pocketed lump with my right, and into his face yelled with schoolteacher-practised volume: “Get your **** hand out of my pocket!!”

He blanched, and his face quivered. He looked rather familiar actually – rather like a downtrodden version of a headteacher I used to work with in Chester — ummm. The thief looked his watery pleading eyes into mine and like a softy I released him sans wallet. (sorry, in Spanish that should be sin wallet – quite appropriate!) He scuttled off through the booing and hissing bus crowd – off, no doubt, to catch a bus going in the opposite direction to Malaga. The mostly local Spanish bus crowd smiled at me and a few thumbs up – they probably get pickpocketed too. I’m glad he didn’t get away with my wallet, not because of the few Euros it contained, or the nuisance of cancelling the credit card – again; I was pickpocketed in Barcelona ages ago – I must have a mug face – but because my wallet is one from Vegetarian Shoes – no animal was skinned to make it!

A charming young woman accosted me yesterday, and I stammered thanks. She was a journalist from a local newspaper who wanted to know more about my Hot Air award in Groningen, and cuddled up to me to ask if their photographer could snap me. I confess this was a telephone interview, so the cuddling is just a fantasy, but as a fantasy writer I’m allowed such indulgencies.

Hayley – she had to tell my wonky hearing twice – wanted to know when Hot Air will be available for readers, but sadly I don’t know. I e-mailed Jean-Marcel, the director of the Wuacademia Arts foundation a week ago and he said it was being worked on. Fair enough, it had sat on my hard drive for 3 years, so what’s another month or so. I’d suggested a cover art to him. Two, actually, but one I like the most is of Erica, the feisty red-headed protagonist as seen in the picture on this page. Another possibilty is the chrome-effect photo of the watch tower on Mallorca that Erica was held captive. People are a better grabber by readers than objects, don’t you think?

I’ve a window in my editing-for-other-people schedule, so hello Xaghra’s Revenge, I look forward to spending a week writing a few chapters. Yesterday, I had a welcome visit from someone who could relate to the historical buzz I get when I hug the stones of the ancient temples (if that’s really what they were) on Malta and Gozo. Andrew J., lived a few houses up from us, and his parents still do. His dad, Alan, was stationed on Malta in WW2 and the islands became a family favourite holiday spot. Andrew now works in New Hampshire, in magazine publishing, and although we’d not seen each other for 9 years, we chatted as if we’d never parted!

Christopher Hill re-emerges?

I learnt yesterday that it seems that Chirstopher Hill
has been ghostwriting a book, Of Atlantis, for the author Lanaia Lee. When her agent (Cheryl Pillsbury, who is her friend or
sister?) accepted it and submitted it to the publisher, Koval
Publishing. Koval is about to publish Of Atlantis and now it seems it is a
plagiarised lift from David Gemmell’s Dark Prince fantasy novel based
on Alexander the Great.

There is understandable wailing and ire from Gemmel fans although some would say to plagiarize him is a kind of homage too, especially when the deception is revealed! Some folk at the Absolute Write and Writers Beware forum seem very agitated that Lanaia would seek a ghostwriter in the first place and so she cannot be a ‘proper’ writer. I think that is rather unfair. I know Lanaia has health issues, which has taken much of her energy and time. It seems understandable to me that after coming up with the plot, characters and ideas, along with writing some of the novel herself, she seeks help to complete the work.

The other concern expressed is that yesterday’s revelations means Christopher Hill is actively continuing to con writers. I’m not totally convinced this is the case. Apparently, he started his ghostwriting for Lanaia Lee in 2005 around the same time that he began the Hill & Hill Literary Agency. We outed him after he fabricated publishers’ reports although it took us a few months because Christopher met some of us face-to-face and conducted long-distance phone calls, coming across as a knowledgeable and genuinely amiable person. Also, unlike the $400 per month he took for ghost writing, he took virtually no money from his literary agency clients, and indeed, spent more than he took buying me drinks in an Edinburgh hotel, buying copies of my Escaping Reality, etc. Because he refunded the small fees to all the Literary Agency clients who asked for them back, the police and FBI felt there was insufficient crime for them to pursue him, but apparently left the files open. He would know this, and he would be very foolish to continue in any underhand or illegal way.

I’m more concerned, but not losing sleep over it, that in the course of his agency work Christopher had his hands on over 60 completed unpublished manuscripts. If he was also ghostwriting, who knows if our work is now published but under someone else’s name – twice removed? He says he destroyed all the scripts submitted to him when the agency crashed, but did he? I’m actively seeking representation and a publisher for Left Luggage. I’d be gutted if I found it re-badged, published by Publish America, under another author’s name! On the other hand if I found Left Luggage had been plagiarized and turned up substantially as a Michael Crichton novel maybe I should cheer and use the honour to publicise my other work!
More details of the Lanaia Lee ghost writing problem is in Victoria Strauss’s blog at Writer Beware

Meanwhile if anyone would like me to ghostwrite a book for them, well I’m too busy writing my own, editing the new Sci fi magazine, Escape Velocity for Adventure Books of Seattle, and editing other good folk’s novels, but I know a man who would…

An alternative to reading is listening, and a different approach to finding publishers for your science fiction novels is to create audio podcasts. My friend in Ireland, Gary Hicks, has been creating marvelous audio experiences out of his Terra Incognita novels, and he’s persuaded me to have a go too.

I’ve already had a bash at reading one of my novels to a microphone. The gifted playwright and actor, Donna Gagnon, and her man, Doug, helped me read my humour thriller Escaping Reality to CD, (the novel is here) but we bungled on the sound quality. So this time I thought I’d aim for shorter stories and picked the anthology of science fiction stories written by Robert Blevins and myself in Dimensions (here but scroll down to find Dimensions). My favourite one I wrote is Prime Meridian, the story of grape-sized meteorites that hit a London house, one a day, every day… I had great fun in the research and writing. I gargled, printed the story in size 14, prepared my microphone, gargled again, and having turned on the software – I used Goldwave, but also have Audacity – I started reading. After 5 minutes, the phone rang. Grrrr. So, I told the re-mortgage salesman to re-mortgage himself and took the phone off the hook. I turned the heating off in case gurgling in the pipes made like the sound effects of my stomach. I finally finished the reading, and played it back. Umm, rather scratchy and quiet. I fiddled with the Goldwave software and made it worse. I yelled Help to Gary, and he put me in touch with his sound engineer friend, Martyn Lycett, a genius of the electronic sound waves. After writing him a PayPal sub he magicked my Prime Meridian into a better-than-I-hoped-for sound. I haven’t had the time to play with the editing but Gary added a musical intro after asking me to select appropriate sounds, edited the ID tags and voila a story to behold. I am subbing it to Podiobooks but they need at least four more stories to be read from Dimensions before it goes on site. In the meantime you can listen freely to Prime Meridian listen here be prepared to wait for the download.

I’ve taken advice from Gary and Martyn and so I have ordered a decent microphone so I shouldn’t need to pay for extra audio editing for the other stories. I’ll still need help from Gary with the tidying up and sounds though… cheers mate!

 Gary Hicks Terra Incognita is on PodioBooks.com here

Cheltenham Festival protests

The Cheltenham Literary Fesitival is in full swing. Like many similar events around the World established writers, agents and publishers are welcome to smile while nodding, smirk while signing hardback copies, and laugh all the way to their banks. Luckily, some venues welcome local authors to some of the events, and not just as fee-paying spectators. Although I come from Cheltenham and have played the piano on the same piano stool as Vladimir Ashkenazy just ater he vacated it, I now live in Chester. Luckily the Chester Lit Fest does welcome local authors and I’ve read excerpts of my Escaping Reality book as part of such festivities.

My nephew Ben Bamber is also a writer, but sadly, remains in Cheltenham, which for some inexplicable reason, does not welcome local authors to participate in the festival unless they are a top author already. Catch 22 in action. Check out Ben’s website for details here.

A wayward asteroid has been spotted that is of a potential danger to me. And you. The asterooid is 2007 RR9, which orbits the sun once every 4.7 years in an elongated orbit taking it for a picnic close to Jupiter before it crosses the ecliptic plane in which the Earth hums along. And then someone looked more closely at it – its statistics anyway – and decided we’ve met this little beastie 60 years ago. Apparently we’d carelessly lost it then even though it was classed as being potentially hazordous because it is over 150 metres wide and could feasibly hit us one day. RR9 is the burnt out remains of a comet – its nucleus. It’s no good trying to spot it with the naked eye. If you can see it then duck because it means it’s already in our atmosphere.

There are many ways to deflect an incoming asteroid besides the Armageddon and Deep Impact Hollywood techniques of trying to blast them with nuclear warheads (probably little imact except to create many smaller but still lethal asteroids). I like the idea of reaching it early enough to plant deflecting ion drives or solar powered engines that slowly but surely send it on a different orbit. But even if such slow processes worked would humans be happy with them? After all, it would mean that we’d have the certain knowledge that an asteroid has its beady eye on us as a bullseye but that it would take weeks or months before we knew it would deflect. I imagine there would be considerable panic and stress if a more immediate solution couldn’t be found. I’d be in favour of superglueing some solid fuel rocket engines to it and steer it off out of orbit or to the sun. Alternatively, there are some local vandals in one of our housing estates who, if bussed out there, would soon reduce it to rubble for the price of a spliff or two.

Britain is experiencing a last gasp of summer today. Brilliant sunshine and although temperatures start out at a chilly 5 C it will increase to around 17C by mid-afternoon. Ideal conditions then for plot complications to be thrown around in my tumble-dryer head as I puff up Welsh hills on my Dawes Super Galaxy – 24 gears and no reverse. My favourite route is via Horseshoe Falls to Llangollen then via Wrexham back home. I need to call in the Cancer Research charity shop in Wrexham. I’d put one of my Escaping Reality books in their home-collection bags. A few days later a letter arrived enclosing a cheque and a note saying that they found an invoice from BookEnds in Carlisle along with the cheque in my book! Silly me. So I have the urge to reward their goodwill with some of my own.

But plumbing is interfering with my plans today. The toilet cistern fitted only last year has ceased to flush. Pull the lever and levers move but the water stubbornly stays put. I opened the lid and it looks more complex than the Enterprise’s warp drive mechanics. Luckily the bathroom fitter lives on top of a hill enroute to Llangollen via World’s End…

I’ve my fantasy, Xaghra’s Revenge, to continue plotting. Two chapters written and while rapid walking to town yesterday, the clipclop of a drawing pin in my shoe (I couldn’t hear it until I plugged in my hearing aid) must have signalled an idea for the next chapter. OK, I have an outline, and it’s been approved by other writers, but then the story needs the baddie’s viewpoint too. So in 1551 the nastiest pirate in the Mediterranean not only has control of a chapter, the ancient spirits from ever more ancient times tap him on the shoulder.

Non-fiction article published

Today, the Golden Goblet is published. It’s an online newsletter created by gifted fantasy writer, Marilyn Peake. My article is called ‘Where the Spanish are German, the English are Scottish and the Sheep wear Cowbells’. Ironically, it is about the research I did on Mallorca to write the Hot Air thriller for which I received the Award in Groningen. I originally wrote the bulk of the article for the BeWrite Community forum, which has now closed. I was urged to find another home for the piece and after updating, subbed it to  Marilyn Peake.