I can’t get enough…

Valetta, Malta

…of being in Malta. From May 2 to 9th my wife and I holidayed at the Preluna Hotel, Sliema for the third – possibly fourth time. It’s on a magnicently paved shoreline and while we stroll along it, the locals are jogging, speed-walking or walking like us. I am thinking of plot lines while my wife talks to me. I nod but, honestly I am really listening too. She made me leave the laptop behind in Chester for the first time. That’s okay, it’s only a week and I had books to read such as Alastair Reynold’s Space Revelation, Vernor Vinge’s Fire Upon The Deep and Michael Summers’ The is Shop – more on those later. In spite of the reading I did get writerly withdraw symptoms after three days and so we took the ferry to the island of Gozo. It’s so laid back, picturesque and deeply moving with its awful history. In 1551 pirates in the pay of the Ottoman empire abducted the entire population of Gozo and took them to Tripoli and Constantinople slave markets, except for those to infirm for the journey. Surely their spirits cry out for revenge and that’s where my magic realism fantasy novel, Xaghra’s Revenge comes in. I take two of the abducted and two contemporary people and play around with their histories and emotions. The reader experiences the slave trade of those days and the frisson when past and present collide. If you are a publisher and are interested then go speak to my agent Rebecca Pratt for a taster.

While in Malta I met author, John Bonello. He writes fantasies, among other genres, in Maltese and is enjoying success with his local publisher, Merlin.

There’s a second-hand bookshop in Chester on the City Walls – website is http://citywallsbooksandmusic.webs.com/ Michael Summers works there and has written a delightful and thought-provoking anthology of science fiction called The Is Shop. Only £4.50 plus p&p – contact him at the shop or via the website. The emphasis of the stories is on science so these are truly science fiction but with humour and characters to enjoy. The first story I admire a lot – The Is Shop in which a young recruit to the shop is mystified by the lack of stock and so much wordplay and intrigue. It’s a shop story like no other.

I have chosen Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge as my choice book for the Chester Library SF book group for later this year, so I had to read it! I chose it because I like the concept of the Technological Singularity coined by Vinge – ie that one day the artificial intelligence machines on Earth will be sufficiently savvy to take over and humans will be redundant. I asked another SF group which of Vinge’s ficiton does this well and they said Fire Upon the Deep although ironically it was published after his paper on the TS. Very intelligently written with two children as main characters – a nice touch for what are adult concepts. Group mentalities in aliens is something I have written too in various stories.

Revelation Space is also interesting but rather cliched and with contrived resolutions in my opinion. I’m glad I read it.

Saint Margaret’s Bastion in Malta and my wife

1)      NEWS in 2013: Voted best SF of 2012 at P&E Readers Poll. Suppose amnesia was infectious? Thank goodness it isn’t but imagine the ramifications if it was. ARIA: LEFT LUGGAGE is the personal story of people, the breakdown of society and yet hope for the few who escaped. Click on this link to Geoff’s blog, which has details including Amazon e-book and paperback http://bit.ly/10VIRKY

ARIA is endorsed by luminaries such as Mike Resnick and Jon C Grimwood.

2)      5 * reviews for the ebook HOW TO WIN SHORT STORY COMPETITIONS. Co-authored by two experienced judges in a dialogue form and has great reviews (not written by us or our friends!) at

http://www.ideas4writers.co.uk/books/storycomps.php

3)      For something completely different try HOT AIR, an award-winning thriller based in England and the Mediterranean. A feisty woman witnesses a heinous crime from a hot air balloon. She’s abducted and kept in a watchtower on Mallorca until she escapes. A page turner on your Kindle at http://www.amazon.com/Hot-Air-ebook/dp/B0084OZL9E/

4)      SF mystery EXIT, PURSUED BY A BEE is exciting interest. Several unique concepts written in an accessible style with a feisty woman main character and with a beginning and end on Glastonbury Tor – festival and all. Paperback and now Kindle at

http://www.amazon.com/Exit-Pursued-Bee-ebook/dp/B001CQC9LY/

Like ARIA at http://www.facebook.com/AriaTrilogy

http://twitter.com/geoffnelder

Acknowledgements for ARIA

ARIA is the new name for my science fiction trilogy of which the first is called Left Luggage. ARIA is an acronym of a amnesia-creating virus released from a case left on the struts of the International Space Station. The book is being published in 2012 by LL-Publications and I thought carefully over the last few days to write a page of acknowledgements. That page is in its first draft but I will post it here because it astonished me how many writers, some famous, have been involved. There have been other folk who I have not named, and who have encouraged me over the years though they have not actually read the manuscript. In particular Gladys Hobson and Brian Withecombe. Like me they had a literary agent, Christopher Hill, who was a sham. He reported to me with detailed progress reports of how Left Luggage attracted interest at HarperCollins and Crown publishers. I was offered a five-figure advance, as were many of his other clients. Sadly, it was all in Hill’s demented mind. He’d not sent our books anywhere and he’d sat in his Edinburgh home in a kind of Walter Mitty stew. I’d even met him over dinner at an Edinburgh hotel and he was smartly dressed, spoke eloquently, and seemed well-educated – all the attributes of what I imagined a literary agent should be. Except he wasn’t as over 60 of his “clients” found out. Many of us belong to a Beyond Hill yahoo group and have had our successes in spite of or maybe because of that weird experience.

So here is the first draft of my acknowledgements page. Feel free to shout if I have missed you or erred.

—-

This novel would not have been possible without Daisy. Her twenty-four gears allowed my legs to rotate up the Welsh slope of Horseshoe Pass near Llangollen making my heart thump so fast my brain – freshly oxygenated – buzzed with an original idea. It was such a novel concept I dismounted at the summit, rushed into the Ponderosa Café and demanded a scrap of paper and a pencil. Thus ARIA was born.

I have trawled files to trigger my memory of all those editors, friends and critiquers who sculpted then polished ARIA to the diamond it now is. Any flaws are not their fault but mine.

The first real editor to lacerate my script and teach me about Point of View and strong characters is Doug Watts from the Jacqui Bennet Writing Bureau. My Hollywood-based pal, Jessie Lilley-Campbell helped me with Americanisms and pushed Left Luggage under the nose of Brad Linaweaver ¹, (Battlestar Gallactica co-writer) who endorsed it. Each chapter cranked their way through the tough critique group of the British Science Fiction Association’s Orbiters including Terry Jackman, Mark Iles, James Bloomer and Ian Clark. Encouragement came from award-winning SF writer Jon Courtenay Grimwood², and Stargate novel writer, Sonny Whitelaw. Urging me on were publisher Neil Marr of BeWrite Books, friend and guru Les Floyd, American writing tutor and award-winning writer, M. Kenyon Charboneaux³, and my American literary agent and friend, Rebecca Pratt. A wonderful writer in her own right, Bec Zugor, advised me on the Italian language uttered by mad Doctor Antonio Menzies. Louise Bolotin of the editing services, Plain Text, helped me with early chapters and query letters.

After all that help, and from too-many-to-mention-others, surely the manuscript would be perfect? Ha ha, but then I sent it to friend, hard-nosed crime writer, and agent, Allan Guthrie. Whoa! Advice from the world expert on pleonasms and tight narrative meant that I started over again.

During this time other novels and over fifty short stories had fled my fingers onto the world, so my style evolved, and is still developing. Perhaps it is in the bronze age now. In the last minutes Zetta Brown and Billye Johnson tweaked and poked ARIA further. Thanks to them and everyone.

None of this would have been possible if my wife had insisted I went out and found a proper job after I left teaching, so ultimate thanks to Gaynor and to my ever-tolerant grown-up kids, Eleanor and Rob. Above all they understand that when I am staring out of the window, I am really working.

NB the image is my sketch potential cover art.

¹ “In Left Luggage Geoff Nelder asks the most important questions of life.”

² “Geoff Nelder wears science fiction like other people wear clothes.”

³ “Memento meets the Twilight Zone.”