Category Archives: Books

December 7, 2012 · 12:50 pm

AUSTRALIAN PRIME MINISTER PREDICTS DOOMSDAY

OK, it was a publicity stunt to support Australian ‘end of the world’ celebrations, but if the Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard can talk of the Mayan Calendar on tv, it has certainly got into the mainstream. So here are the Phoenix Ark End of World Celebrations! The thriller The Godhead Game, by David Clement-Davies, will be completely free for Kindle download at the ‘end of the world’ itself, December 21st, 22nd and the 23rd, as a delicious stocking filler, now it’s virtually snowing again of Phoenix’s blog.

If people are slightly confused about when the world stops, in terms of the Mayan Calendar anyway, it is because that 13th Ba’aktun cycle of the Mayan Long Count Calendar, one of several calendars, but counting time in terms of thousands of days, is related to the Mayan’s practice of divination and counting linked to the cycle of seasons, and of course solstices, but also an apparent prophecy of darkness related to something called the Tortuguerro stela, or stone, in Honduras. But the solstice always varies around the 21st and 22nd of December, tipping us back to life and the sun, while something exists called the Lounsbury Calculation too, that questions the precise date of the Long Count’s end.

It is all explained in The Godhead Game, a story that starts with an end of the world warning and a threatening email to an FBI system’s man in Washington, since we are all now ‘net’ connected, inviting him to change his life forever, while his brother is simultaneously kidnapped from a World Cup football match in Brazil. If writers try to look into ‘truth’, or even prophecy events, some fictional events have already come true (though the novel is set in 2014) with the re-election of President Obama. Hopefully other elements will not come true, namely what the thriller is also about, the murderous conflict over Iran and a hunt for nuclear secrets, that might really bring an end to everything!

Otherwise it is a philosophical investigation of ‘Apocalypse’ ideas, which in Ancient Greek really means a revelation, of science versus faith, and a romp through history, to tell a good story, with some kind of lasting message. That is perhaps what ‘new agers’ see in any Mayan Prophecy, not that it is the end of the world, but the end of one world and the dawn of another kind of awareness in Mankind’s consciousness. If we all evolved out of nature such a thing is surely possible. Namely what is really being seen right around the planet now, that to survive we have to start waking up to each other, and the enormous power for creativity or destruction that we all possess and somehow start to do things differently. Quite apart from the fact that every single second is the end of the world for someone dying on the planet, and the beginning for someone else being born into its bizarre and amazing mystery. Perhaps too that old ideas of religion have to be put away, and yet a ‘spiritual’ language has to be rewritten, not destroyed by the truths and marvels of higher science, which can help us all be fully human and find out what it is we truly value in ourselves and each other.

For the link for an END OF THE WORLD FREE DOWNLOAD, on 21st, 22nd and 23rd December just CLICK HERE

Happy Christmas or whatever festival, atheist hols, Solstice and a very happy future to everyone.

PA PRESS

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November 26, 2012 · 4:42 pm

FEARING FOR THE HOBBIT

Last year I wrote to Simon Tolkien and the J.R.R Tolkien estate with a suggestion, strictly resisted, to write a prequel to The Lord of The Rings, about those terrible, glorious figures The Nazgul, the nine riders, called The Lair of The Nine. It began to get my blood flowing and that ‘Edgar Wallace’ hot feeling at the top of my head, to be wasted in the ether of ‘nos’. But then The Lord of the Rings was for me one of those seminal books, a cross over between the world of children’s books and great adult literature, that is often so vitally expressed by fantasy fiction, ranging from writers like Tolkien to Bulgakov.

It was Frodo’s frantic flight to Riverdale, chased by the blood curdling nine, and the intervention of magic and the racing river, that was so consuming to me at twelve, I think I read the novel three times. The narrative power, scope and mythological complexity of that book is astounding and natural inspiration for Peter Jackson’s great trilogy of movies, now loved the world over, especially by Hollywood accountants. Of course, it was far more than just ordinary fantasy or storytelling to the likes of Tolkien, who, with writers like CS Lewis, with his deeply Christian themes in those doorways to other world Narnia books, formed the Oxford club ‘The Inklings’. For all The Lord of The Rings’ obvious echo of contemporary events, like the rise of the Nazis, the Second World War and the coming of chaos, the fear of ‘shirey’ England’s uprooting, pitted against Frodo’s quest to destroy the Ring of Power, the tyranny that threatens all, Tolkien’s inklings are about real psychic worlds too, inside and out, perhaps concepts of ‘gods’ like Jungian archetypes, and the vital tensions between the imaginative realm and ‘reality’.

But there was that other book, a far younger and gentler novel, a ‘Wind in the Willows’ breath of inspiration and harbinger to The Lord of The Rings, preparing Tolkien to be a far deeper author, The Hobbit. It is already putting fur on folk’s feet and starting to see it curl around the toes to hear that Jackson’s take will also be three films. The Tolkien estate may go on about respecting the integrity of Tolkien’s vision and mythology but they and Jackson are still prey to the temptations of money, mass media and merchandising. MMM…

Can a charming frolic like The Hobbit really sustain three films, even if Jackson does draw on obscure books like The Silmarillion? Such works are what should be kept in the backroom to Tolkien’s genius as a story teller, the Bagginsssssy equivalent of learning Klingon to Trekkies. There is much in The Hobbit, from all those dwarves, to the spidery horrors of Mirkwood, to Barrels Out of Bond and Smaug’s jewel encrusted belly and deathy hot breath. Proving of course a dragon really lies under everything. But it still needs the lightness of a younger work, a more innocent one, and battles and sword fights will not make up for it, while three films may stretch the spider’s web to breaking point. Even The Lord of The Rings films at times voided some of the depth and richness of the novels for me, though its architecture was sustained by the shere scope of such a work, that took seven years to write. Conversely The Hobbit is not epic in sweep, but a rather simple story of journey and return, and far more comfortable, like Bilbo himself and Bag End.

But if to me, though I loved them, the Jackson films rather hashed a very essential element to Tolkien’s core inspiration as writer, the earth, a pagan voice and above all those slow to decide trees, The Ents, fighting against an instinctive fear of mechanisation and the twentieth century, it is an absolute crime that and The Hobbit both void another magic element in Tolkien’s vision, in those deep roots of nature magic, the almost all-powerful Tom Bombadil. Indeed some power that could defeat any darkness, so itself a repeating symbol of needed hope. Like Shakespeare’s fairies they are characters hard to incarnate beyond the writer’s voice, but do not need much and are one of the natural springs to creative genius an author inserts to hint at where it is all coming from in the first place. Still, keep reminding us all that a film is not a book, a very different experience, and there’s lots of wonder and fun to look forward to.

DCD

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November 7, 2012 · 12:43 pm

WELL DONE AMERICA!

Not so much ‘God Bless’ as well done America, in choosing the right President. Especially in a time of still very high, though falling unemployment, it is remarkable that Obama was re-elected so strongly, and though Romney seemed an attractive and not so extreme figure, in the last throws of the election, Americans can surely feel proud of re-electing a figure of true balance, statesmanship, humanity and stature. Though now we will see how he makes good, especially with the January financial crisis looming, and how it carries around the world.

But one of the ‘prophecies’ in the thriller, The Godhead Game, has just come true, Obama’s second term, as we get closer to that imaginative ‘end of the world’, in this December’s end of the Mayan Long Count Calendar. Not some doomsday proof of apocalypses, though the world is always starting and ending for someone, each moment of our lives, but perhaps an intuition about world events. Perhaps it will be fun seeing how much a thriller gets things right. But very worrying signs are on the horizon, if we don’t all wake up to something, not least in the single most dominant foreign policy issue, Israel’s mounting paranoia about Iran and Nuclear weapons.

They, and the Mayan Long Count, are all themes inside a story and thriller, in The Godhead Game, A Game of Secrets, A Hunt for Skulls, A Battle of Spies, available HERE

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September 29, 2012 · 12:44 pm

THE MUZZLED BLOG?

29th September 2012

The problem with talking about the past, or even leaving this blog up for six months, is it’s a place of neurosis, shame and even psychological harm for me. It’s just that somehow I will not let Abrams get away with what they did to a writer, person, work and the law. With what they did to truth, me and my stories. Rather than being some simple ‘Mr Stalker’ back in 2008, to the ‘Damsel in Distress’, with someone I saw as potentially my wife and after two years together, I was, at times, on my knees to my ex in New York, though on a phone from London. Asking not only for love, or even a friendship also reversed, but for my privacy to be respected or protected, as their own author, who a publisher said was “loved at Abrams”. Bound there with five novels, an enormous thing in any writing life and career. It is because of issues in my past, I’ve found hard to cope with sometimes, especially as ‘children’s author’, having some small public profile, but any split up involves the feeling of invasion. But I alone know the journey of my own books, the huge emotional process that involved, which is why I so feared what an ex did, and so asked her not to, at the heart of my American publisher. She knew about previous publishing fights too and a ten-year struggle to start taking off as a writer in the US, but it made no difference.

When I told an ex what I had been through already though, for nearly a year, trying to tour professionally too, as company support started to vanish, the person who just refused to read FELL, that book joked about by her and my own editor, as I wrote us into it so happily, asked “am I evil?” and I answered “of course not”. Dangerous and awful labels at that level, among supposedly adult or sophisticated people, and with presumed higher knowledge of the process of art and writing itself, indeed of metaphor. Especially out of a family there, perhaps, with darkness in the background we discovered while going out, I think part of the reason for such an obsessive sense of privacy or rights on her part, especially related to Children’s Books. But with literally no imagination for other’s rights or privacies at all. Dangerous labels she then used against me, and my own editor heard too, but just left there outrageously for five months.

Pathetic to plead too, but I literally could not just walk away, or curl up and die, and the psychological invasion became terrible, trying to work there, and produced massive writer’s block too. As intense as was the rage that came out, at times, because I could not protect myself, so lashed out in words, like the cornered animals I was writing about in my fantasy novel. My own editor saw it fully, and it was much the reason I tried to take power back in a much lighter novel. As I later lashed out in a way that shook a whole firm. My ex though, having so betrayed trust with her “Hew, Screw and Glue” book, slammed a door but had invaded me over another friend in London too, living up the road. With her personally extreme reversals, silence and passive aggression in the place she was, that she said she found ‘hard’ for months in early 2008, but did anyway, she simply went to another man, and changed a phone number, as she warned she might. But first leaving me completely in the dark, as did the people I knew so well and needed to work with, right next to her, she then left a distortive accusation in the background, disappeared, and let a destruction of an entire career unfold. “I wish you peace,” it was tagged, in an official company email, when I tried to contact through my publisher, talking of how she had found life happiness, as the people on the inside of course won. I have never heard from her since, but she never stood up to stop a thing professionally, as she could so easily have done. It was the full expression of the power and harm we had been arguing about before, now relayed into a limitless future. That’s love in New York City, for two years together, friendship, truth, or just the business of books.

My own ten-year editor though, now Vice President, after openly threatening me months before on the subject herself, and turning off the tap of support, showed no duty of care either, breaching my privacy to an outside editor and publisher, I heard on the grapevine from my own New York agent, who later jumped ship. That alone is called basic editorial malfeasance and pretty outrageous considering her written instruction to me that I should effectively “keep my mouth shut.” Um, writers are not editors, even if it all poured out in emails and into the wrong places in such distress. Then, once my apology had taken too much blame, and she felt she had the green light to discuss it with me openly on paper, she came in with a sledge-hammer, attacking me personally, and openly breaching conditions in written contract too. In a complete expression of editorial power and abuse, that destroyed editorial sensitivity and trust in commissioned work in progress. You cannot imagine the pain of that, a personal nightmare now raised to the level of semi-official company line, or at least a small department inside a company, Amulet, when I was allowed no say and no defence either, until I refused to work. Only then was I told “a firm takes this sort of thing very seriously’. Sure, but who is the firm? Let alone how awful it was being discussed and judged ‘personally’ at work, by two women once at the centre of my life, but having that alliance between an ex and my editor, intimate with my ex’s new man too, as I saw when I flew to New York. It was like having acid poured into an openly wounded psyche, a wound that had got bigger for two months of dialogue before a number was changed, as an ex knew, but instead cynically used a label to gloss everything. I say cyncically because I am sure it was discussed internally as strategy.

Especially after I had almost begged for some kind of help or understanding about growing internet addiction too, with a medical issue involved too, after having openly talked healing with a partner and in my books, as I felt my emotional life over. But rather than show understanding, or the ‘compassion‘ she started patronisingly mouthing, the woman who had also called all porn ‘evil’ not only rejected everything we had been, but called me literally evil too, though quickly tried to reverse it. She knew it’s implications. “Life is unfair” was and is her only bottom line though, and “Hew, Screw and Glue” you too, buddy. The outcome of the story proves that. It is why her pride in being like a self-described “self cleaning oven” became so awful and unilateral in those circumstances too.

Out of what had been severe psychic disturbance already then, near breakdown, it was me against my own publisher, with betrayed love and friendships in the background, in both New York and London, still trying to work and function. Going mad alone in a flat, in fear and agony, well used words, it lasted for a year and more and brought repeated thoughts of suicide. Abrams tried to push me out, backed down, reversed it, then half backed down again, but I walked away, then Abrams pursued me right up to 2011, to muzzle a blog and hide the truth. Their outrageous assertion was the protection of my ex’s career, or privacies they so destroyed, even Human Rights, when I had repeatedly asked for this all to just stop, for everyone’s sake. They openly denied my Human and contracted rights and showed very little Due Process at all.

My own commissioning editor destroyed the wonderful working conditions we had had before too though, and cut off all channels with people there I had loved working with, even against protected say in a cover written into contract, after promising help with a book. The threats, acts of contempt, duress and bullying went on for months, before I threw down a pen, and forced an ‘enquiry’. I could not go on, did not become a writer for that, and they would have forced a book into print they did not think good enough, and which would itself have harmed my writing reputation. They mutilated principles of Moral Copyright too, let alone written contract, that held another novel there four years. I proved their enquiry a white-wash, with its fifteen minutes by phone and editors lying about a major breach of trust issue written all over my communications. My bright and very ambitious editor was fully aware of the political implications, long before I lost the plot, or begged, or why else threaten with “we will protect our girl” in early 2008, then describe me as a ‘good person’ when I apologised and asked for help? Why good? Because I decided not to take it elsewhere, even though the threat was already huge. Yet seeing me ‘in so much pain’, did nothing objective to help or maintain proper editorial duty either, nor bring needed peace back. My publisher warned me on the phone “You know what could happen” and called me a “nice guy”, but what kind of nice guys are they, and was it really necessary? I raise the charge of IIED, Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress. In New York a woman who had hot coffee spilt on her was awarded a million dollars!

It became sustained psychological torture for an author, using my good name and career, five novels with them, and entire future livelihood, after the pain of what had happened ‘personally’, out of an ex’s almost complete negligence and double standards, even possible malice, to threaten and force silence. Not for everyone’s benefit at all, but theirs alone, so that a secret would not get beyond a department, especially to a CEO. Why could an ex not allow just a professional peace though, in a small department? In law that is called Improper Motivation, and it was very nasty indeed. It became so mendacious that lies were told everywhere, promises broken, and there was no editorial trust or honest comment. I only learned what my own editor really thought of a manuscript in process from my own vanishing agent. Which even a bullying CEO could not deny, when he accepted my attack on the grounds of collusion, and breach and repudiation of contracts, and work started again in mid 2009 with a new editor, for a time. What they did when a family issue came into the frame is just unbelievable, but then it’s a pretty unbelievable story.

The pain has returned, and confusion too, because though it could have been stopped at key moments, on their front, it’s source goes back six years too, to a woman who asked and promised for care over relationships and trusts, I gave her at every turn. Who asked me not “to make her the last to know”, yet did that absolutely to me, at a puerile and completely selfish level of consciousness too. But somehow I will find a way out, and end a disgraceful human and artistic story forever. Either that, or end this blog itself, now ‘The Muzzled Blog’, but you see the former writer’s problem! Love and work are surely the two things that really matter in anyone’s life, and both were stripped from me, in the same place, totally ruthlessly in the end, or because New York companies are places of awful fear and back stabbing. My ex’s projected life fears were enormous though. They tore aware my power in the world, well published writing, rights even in contract, and my ability to earn, while the end of that line is now losing my flat too.

It was disgraceful or shaming on my part sometimes, sure, especially with my sense of a family name, as I lost control of words, touched breakdown and nearly went mad, though have never harmed anyone in my life. As I writhed, trying to get out of a place I could not and trying to explain it to an editor too, let alone understand it myself. But utterly disgraceful, indeed possibly criminal, on the part of people I knew intimately for years, and New York publisher Abrams. Where I was tortured trying to work in safety and my career thrown in a trash-can, my publisher removed, and the two women who did the real damage in the first place, very much in cahoots, got straight to the top. It is not because of my editor’s special editorial skills, certainly not the dreadful edit she delivered to me, but more importantly under the wrong conditions, also begged for back and denied because of her ‘power over her list’, nor love for books, people or publishing at all. It is because my editor brought in huge bestsellers like The Diary of A Wimpy Kid and Hello Kitty to Abrams. She used my book The Sight to get her job, supposedly Fire Bringer too, but for her “loyalty is a tricky thing.” I think that’s why a CEO removed a man he did not get on with, who was far nicer and more imaginative and who all his authors liked. It has implications too about how men are always painted the villains nowadays.

In every other sphere of life there are employment protections, legal standards, means of redress, we have come to expect as very basic, but not in the one place where the fundamentals of freedom of speech and human vision themselves actually begin, Publishing. Because it is only commercial success that gives a writer any real power or protection, if good relationships, which is what it is really about, become so damaged. I am watching as any say in the printed copies of my lauded published books is stripped away too. In reverse, people inside publishers are protected by each other, share schemes and pension plans, and the interrelations of big money makes them much like the Cartels we complain about in banking. Editors move between publishing houses and so does negative gossip and ‘ ‘decision making‘. I could not stay at Abrams because I would not be just ‘owned’ and abused like that, my legal rights stripped away, the very principle of true editorial interchange and dialogue destroyed. There needs to be an Ombudsman to stop those individual nightmares, or release pressures for both writers and editors too, but the degree of open abuse that took place at Abrams, over so long, is phenomenal, and I fear has done lasting emotional harm.

“We are willing to bring happier memories into the future” my own editor informed me, at one point, after I apologised in a way meant to protect everyone and be heard, to an author under two contracts, with two published novels there. But only if I shut up about an ex who had broken such trusts, personal and professional, so harmed very happy memories here, but then left an impossible and distortive accusation right at the heart of a firm, that I was not even allowed to defend. It’s consequences distorted everyone’s judgements and actions. Thanks for the legal and editorial principle, and the happy memories too. I will look to real friends, and pray for small miracles elsewhere.

DCD

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September 27, 2012 · 9:22 am

THE MUZZLED BLOG

27th September 2012 –

I had a weird dream last night, about a great, ancient house, and a beautiful woman seeking love, yet my failure to reach her! Something’s terribly wrong then, and out of a story that might give actual proof of what Jung called The Collective Unconscious, with so many connected dreams, I think it’s about my own family name, and a ‘house’ I’m very proud of. My father and grandfather’s house. The third post below has been removed then, not in again backing down on it here, but because there are ‘Calibans’ out there, in the lost cyber world, and it’s too specific and too invasive to my family. It’s also too long. I’ve been very ashamed in terms of harm to that name, having had to talk about my fear, internet addiction and a nervous breakdown, although the term’s too easy. As for Fifty Shades of Grey stuff, just let it be some warning about what it does to real love, although I think the psyche will find any way it can to heal itself and I try not to judge. Anyone can come here just to talk about it, in trust. A writer is on a reader’s side, as editors should be on a writer’s side. You cannot be labelled mad and evil by a major editor though, at the heart of a department, and it just be left there at any serious publisher. A cry for help has been completely wrong, I would rather help, and this isn’t, it is open protest.

As for miracles, it’s enough to know some ‘bad’ miracle happened, if only in the relationship between my novel, and real events with a real child, concerned with eyesight and seeing. But then I did write The Sight. It’s written not just across one but several novels, and strange events too, as Fell involves people at my own publisher Abrams, in happier days. The novel commented on by an ex and my own editor, as it was being written and real events being turned to fiction, but which an ex refused to even read, as she slammed a door. It’s tragic that at a Children’s and fantasy publisher, Amulet, a wing of Abrams, and with people who mouth ‘God’, they could not have given the spirit of love to at least try a real miracle, when I cried out in the middle of Scream, or something good for a family, in those terrible circumstances. I think that’s why a CEO reversed a decision to cancel a book, he had no right to cancel, only when a family member called, so not to been seen to be awful, yet the way they tried it was even more Kafkaesque. I resisted that too, but had to walk away.

Two people there, my editor, the now Vice President, and the President of Abrams, should answer it, and say why they destroyed a lauded writing career, with no regard to writing process, award-winning story or fans at all. With no regard to the meanings in my books, trying to address Global Warming, endangered animals or a climate of World Terror, much about America, that must affect our children as much as us all. They are not simple issues, as Man is not a simple animal, and need addressing in story. Perhaps they have to ask if an ex is only capable of malice. Why the former Vice President and my publisher was removed, but no redress made to me, or just no action taken to stop it, and where they think real ‘evil’ lies too. Whether it might be more related to terrible American labels like ‘Evil’, their legal abuses, appalling human cruelty, over so long, and to the obsessive privacies of a woman, my ex and so-called friend, who comes from a family involved in real child abuse and a death from Aids, but who caused such much harm in her selfishness and mounting arrogance. That does not ignore my own rage, or pleading.

The CEO admitted both Civil Conspiracy inside a department and breach and repudiation of contracts. I’m loosing my home now, but no US lawyer will touch the case, because I can’t afford to pay, and perhaps because of my so-called ‘harassment’ of someone I loved, had spent two years with, and discussed a life and future with. A Pro Se, self respresenting action 3000 miles away is too difficult, and could take years, while only 7% win, but never say never. The truth is it was harassment of me too, by my editor too, in a place I could not walk from, with five novels at a firm and a career just taking off in the USA, although something tore out of me, in despair at what people can do, and what she did. Their lie though that my ex, simply as an officer of company, had no better duty of care to me than “Hew, Screw and Glue” was first used in a cover up, I exposed, then described as ‘tedious’ by a CEO, then returned to as a legal manoeuvre to further harass me and a blog right up to 2011, and hide the truth.

Every time they have backed down, when I found the strength to stand up, if sometimes I just appealed to love or spirit and hate invasion, and I have invited them to challenge in court. They should be shamed into action, but have no shame. It was humanly appalling that a woman I had a natural right to trust, let alone loved, could not show any sensitivity to my asking for help over addiction too, or to protect delicate privacies, from a medical issue, to other secrets. Think of ‘David’ in ‘One flew over the Cuckoo’s nest‘ and Jack Nicholson getting labelled mad and lobotomized. Perhaps I should be happier being ‘the bad boy’. The response she put in a Company email was collusion too, inside a small department I loved, incredibly cruel, and harmed several people’s lives. It’s human and artistic cynicism is disgusting.

I am stopping a blog though, because it is harmful to me psychologically, going back and back to the issue. But also in silent protest at what happened and is happening everywhere, although this is just one publishing story. There’s no respect nor protection for the artist though, unless money is involved, but all over we see abuses of power. Abrams’s abuses became monumental, but Macmillan UK were in specific breach of contract too, just handing electronic rights to Penguin US, and have no respect for a classic novel either, letting Fire Bringer fall out of hard copy print after 12 years, and with amazing reviews, and resounding love and praise from readers. Penguin UK keeps classics in print, even if the turnover is not huge. I wonder what they will do to The Sight. It sounds arrogant to say it, but when a friend of my brother’s asked what her daughter might think of Fire Bringer and I said she’ll say it’s “the best book she’s ever read“, in three weeks she came back to say “she said it’s the best book she’s ever read!” I’m not arrogant, but very confident as a writer and storyteller, or was, when I was allowed to do it, with proper and legally contracted support. I just can’t survive this now and cannot find an agent or the right support. No simple sob story, just an awful story.

Culture is in danger though when no one stands up, but then my own editor was allowed to breach my rights to Privacy and Seclusion to another publisher at Penguin US, treating everything I am as owned commodity, while literally using a threat to my own career to muzzle me. “The one thing in life I have learnt, David, if anything, is to keep my mouth shut,” she had already said. As well as warning “we will protect our girl” and being intimately involved both with my ex and her new man, as I saw when I flew out to New York. Fine, but you are a protected editor, behind the scenes, living off share schemes in your writer’s work, using The Sight in your job interview, not an author hired and risking everything to write truthful or inspiring stories. What she said on the phone to my former agent Ginger Clarke in 2009 must be considered to have involved some kind of criminal libel. “Loyalty is a tricky thing,” she once told me too. It certainly is at Abrams.

She put Abrams in specific breach of written conditions of contract too, fighting absurdly for her “power over her list”, nothing else, and admitted to seeing it was all”holding my life to ransom”. But then did nothing except exploit the situation to get to the top as Vice President and try and force a novel into print she mangled, to try and keep a secret from a CEO. The Calibans are definitely at the heart of Abrams, and these are bald facts. That is why ‘culture’ is being given mass market books like Diary of A Wimpy Kid and Hello Kitty, which drive the money machine and so editorial power too.

I was born to write and am rather addicted to blogging too now, earning nothing here, if we’re all addicted to the Internet these days. That needs debate itself but the truth is Phoenix Ark, including most design, was built single handed. Readers’s letters and support were extremely important to that. There are brilliant stories here though, about many things, especially real London in the late 16th Century and Edmund Shakespeare, and other artists and writers might have come in, if everyone was not so wary of being linked to a ‘scandal’, or just looking for cash.

That is the sadness of watching supposed friend’s reactions too, though it is quite hard to stand up to what I did stand up to, in such circumstances. You fight into a place of love and it harms the Self. It was quite hard to get my sanity back, at a point of the most enormous metaphysical grief and fear. I challenged Abrams, God and Heaven, like a loony, when I wrote to them and went on pilrimage, but it reconnected me, heart and soul, and Heaven’s inside and only on earth. Like Hell. I’ve committed to readers to try and get Scream out and will, but everything stops now, until something dramatic changes, which I fully expect, in our frightened, frightening and faithless world, melting ice caps and all, it will not.

Just to stress who I am, to resist any more fear or shame here, and show how the sad years have rolled on, a new author photo is going up in the page headed “The Beginning” too. Pity it’s most likely the end, but it was not for want of trying. Perhaps it’s been too much about me, but its spirit is about the times. I’m not Paulo Coehlo, nor a Catholic, am fascinated by science and nature, the writing power is really there, but I’ve seen true darkness and could help too, in a world that needs balance back, and the language of love, that breathes out of literature, religious and secular. Perhaps in six months time some miracles of the human heart will be allowed, because that is what storytelling is about too.

David Clement-Davies

Phoenix Ark Press

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September 26, 2012 · 3:31 am

PHOENIX ARK CLOSES

To add to the flaming post below, far too long for most to read, I’m closing a blog. It’s been a source of anguish, invasion and neurosis itself, but with respect to truth, much good work, and warnings too, I’m keeping it up online for at least six months. My strange “J’Accuse”, even if I blame myself too. As for Abrams, two women key to my life, an ex and my editor, wrecked a person, work, trusts and broke the most fundamental legal principles too, completely hand in glove and lying through their teeth. But the human and creative damage they stood over is just unbelievable. It’s key moment was that “Hew, Screw and Glue” with that creep of a man in London, that rather sums up the whole scandal, but for many reasons they should answer the charge that the ‘evil’ is fully theirs, not just claw their way to the top, though I guess a business is perfectly entitled to set Hew, Screw and Glue as its real benchmark. Quite a family at “Family Abrams”. You can try writing to my ‘editor’ too, who used The Sight in her own Abrams job interview. Time to thank real friends, and many readers, but get a life again! There might just be a slight chance. DCD

PA PRESS

ps as to Andrew Marr, at least he reversed his Super Injunction, and it’s really those reconstructions that were so….

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September 25, 2012 · 5:15 pm

THE FLAMES OF HEAVEN AND HELL, FIFTY SHADES OF GREY AND THE BAD PHOENIX ARK MIRACLE

THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN SUSPENDED AS TOO INVASIVE TO DCD AND TOO MANY PEOPLE

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September 25, 2012 · 3:06 pm

THE SHAKESPEARE INSCRIPTION

phoenixark

you underestimate the power of Roper´s argument. To find words by chance in a grille is easy. To find a readable sentence is VERY improbable. To find a readable sentence with a relevant bearing on the subject simply doesn’t happen. A grille built on the figure 31 will give us PAT SIP NO FLEAS, on 32 HE YET HIT AS COT, 35: TOY TIE OR SO, and so on. But only a 34-column grille will give an answer to the challenge put to the reader of the monument: READ IF THOU CANST WHOM ENVIOUS DEATH HATH PLAST WITHIN THIS MONUMENT (for Shakespeare). Combined with the anomalies in the text, which serves the hidden message to be readable, the figure 34 which has a certain correspondence to the name hidden and the fact that the concealed words come in clusters, strengthen the argument that the whole thing was put there by design. Moreover since the person hidden in the message happens to be the same as the one person in history with the strongest known connections, biographical or literary or anything, to the texts we call the Shakespeare canon, should be enough to make anyone who cares about truth at least a bit curious.

IF, I say if, the Folio had been printed without a name on the first page, who would we today consider the Author? A man who left no traces of a literary life AT ALL, like William-of-Stratford, or a man whose literary fingerprints are left on virtually every page, like Edward de Vere? The answer is obvious, but we have a paradigm shift to go through before the world is ready for it, and such things are painful experiences to many people. So painful actually that the wish to stay in the phase of denial can be lifelong.

(pardon my English, I am from Northern Europe)

Many thanks for that. For a shortish reply please see the comments pages in The Earl fo Oxford, William Ray and a Leering hydrocephalic idiot. To go there CLICK HERE and go down to comments, at the bottom right, in blue.

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September 20, 2012 · 10:17 am

ABRAMS, PRIVACIES AND TRUTH

Perhaps the most dignified way to describe what happened back 2008/9 was a kind of nervous breakdown. Although it was stranger than that, and trying to work and protect myself, I was never allowed to break down. I went into a kind of emotional black hole, so dark it seemed to swallow light. At times I was both clever and even manipulative, perhaps, but think of how thinking about such places is called The Genius Point. Although I always fought for the wider truth, and indeed somehow to protect everyone! Then the only way I could fight something that held me in a kind of hell for two years and more though, and profoundly disagreeing with it on many principles, was to ‘breach’ supposed privacies by writing about what happened at Abrams here.

It has been rather boring at times, for readers, trying to find some “court of public opinion”, which I actually don’t trust much. It certainly was not the person I was before I fell foul of New York. As for my “madness”, perhaps I should quote Shakespeare’s Brother and one Elizabethan actor who ended up in the vicious Bedlam of the day and found himself crying “They thought me mad, and I they!”

It involved something both frightening and very difficult for me, indeed shaming, and precisely the point of the damage they did over so long. Actually pure cruelty. Though there has been a deal of confusion over something so personal too, I did it to step beyond the kind of corruption I still believe or know they engaged in, written all over the story of a CEO’s negative relationship with a publisher, and why it allowed him to be replaced by my own editor, while destroying their own author too. It is actually self-evident and was both professionally and humanly terrible.

Nor was I allowed any protection of my privacy at all, and part of the ‘madness’ was the absolute hypocrisy there, and my own ferocious, even desperate fight to protect myself, while I was the author trying to function, under contract. It was an attack on story telling itself, and the conditions needed to get there. It was also, in any pretence of due process there, a glaring attack on free speech. Not least beacuse not only did they hold my life and career to ransom, not once did they stop to think about the meanings in my books, both in terms of Global Warming and a climate of terror, two novels intended to specifically address.

When an editor where you are trying to work and are contracted is allowed to get away with calling you mad, deluded and evil, but you are instructed to shut up, under threat of your own career and livelihood, you have a right to ask where evil really lies. Whether an ex’s furious sense of rights and privacy, but no regard for mine, and bizarre turn arounds were directly related to her and a strange family, or indeed the discovery inside a relationship that a relation of theirs, with a terrible temper, had abused a teenager. With my own life angers, or issues with the past, it is why I sent them The Shipping News, though any sense of art or healing has been irrelevant to how they handled it. It is about money, ‘power’ and jobs, and rights but absolutely no sense of responsibility.

At the heart of a children’s publisher I know it influenced that obsession with privacy, that fearful secrecy there, and since I started to write about what evil really is in a novel too, in part outrage that she had so labelled me, and because such labels have always been themes of such complex works, it helped lead to an emotional hell. Since a young adult fantasy author has to return to certain emotional states while writing, even very idealistic emotions and thoughts, the way I was treated trying to make that journey of “growing up” for readers was actually repeatedly abusive. It is related to how verbally abusive or rude I became at times. I still insist though that in those circumstances, what a publisher did to me and my work was sinister, unnecessary, pure politics and a human and professional evil.

Evil is actually not some easy metaphysical concept, or should not be, but what people really do to each other, and allow to be done by doing nothing too. In other ways I think many have suffered and will suffer from that kind of group fight, side-based mentality and American labelling too, not to mention hypocrisy. It does matter at the heart of a New York publisher and it matters that men too can sometimes be too easily labelled a source of harm, though my own energy became horrid at times. Perhaps what matters is a story that might take a long time to properly understand and talk about. But I could have lost a person, but healed it professionally, if a person had not just left a label there, to keep secrets inside a small department, distorting the truth of what happened over months, indeed three years before, and why. That showed no trace of love, friendship, fareness, nor any kind of professional respects, that induced the crisis in the first place. Indeed if my own editor had not become so arrogant and bullying.

For many dislikes of the Press, I do not agree with Max Mosley though, but rather Ian Hislop’s argument that draconian privacy laws can be used to mask other legal abuses. Even if I wish my own life and privacy had been protected, perhaps respected is a better word, my life problems,fears and shared intimacies, right at the source of work and deep affections, both by and ex and by my own editor. Exposed in a big novel too, it was like leaving some psychic wound open and my editor should have stopped it too. It is precisely why authors far more than editors need their privacies respected, at least by their own publisher and editor. Privacies for everyone are important, because they much depend on how individuals can or cannot cope with invasion, but I believe people should be aware enough to know it is not exactly about how everyone ‘should’ behave, especially in very particular circumstances, more about what is happening to real people and the suffering they are going through. The facts remain in all blogs here, and my judgments of it too, but who they actually are is no one else’s business, and so all names have now been changed.

I ask every reader to respect that and forget it as any ‘public’ affair. It was also three years ago and very sad. This was always about the relationship between fictions and real events too, astonishing to me, and perhaps in itself it starts to change the story, mediating ‘truths’, as the use of language does, and no one is one thing, fixed in time. Especially not labelled by the very person who has caused such harm, then my editor, then a whole firm. It is a fact of libel law that if a libel is established as such it is only necessary to be able easily to identify the person or people in question. That is rather inevitable in still identifying Abrams in New York, but it is not libel, and I will never back down on it, or be intimidated on points of bogus legal ‘principle’. But real names once served their purpose to stand up to an attack by a UK lawyer. As for Phoenix Ark, as I’ve said, the only proper way to challenge it would actually be through a civil action in a court of law.

DCD

PA PRESS

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September 19, 2012 · 11:41 am

TRAVEL WRITING AND HOW IT STUMBLED WITH A SHORT WALK IN THE HINDU KUSH

Every world is changing, even as you step into it. But my own experience of how the world changed in travel writing was growing up reading the likes of Eric Newby, he of A Short Walk in The Hindu Kush. Like Patrick Lee Fermour, Newby was one of the gentlemen greats, who came to travel edit the pages of the Observer, and when I went out to The North West Frontier, lots of people took his very funny Short Walk with them, including me. How travel writing has changed since then, and how our knowledge of Pakistan and Afghanistan too. No longer an adventure, more a horror story. But then all writing is the mediation of supposed universal experience, through a particular consciousness, as language and its precise use mediates too. It was why it was a little funny, talking of “gentlemen greats” to find Country Life editing an article about a polo match on the Shandur Pass, from my line about a local man peeing in a lake, to his “relieving himself”. Up in the Hindu Kush folk pee, they do not relieve themselves, if “this is true, throughout the shires, that horses sweat but Man perspires!”

I was always freelance, trying to write in papers like The Telegraph, The Times or Guardian, specialising in stories related to wildlife or environmentalism. It never brought in any money, but it did give the chance to do some extraordinary trips, and to write too. So I heard little stories like an editor bumping into Jan Morris, James in a dress by then, and telling her travel writers had charmed lives. Hmmm. Jan Morris is certainly a deeply charmed writer. The problem was the days when you could sound off as real traveller and writer were also morphing into the days when you had to write about the quality of hotel shower heads, and so sell the travel industry itself, to support a paper’s advertising revenues.

The democratically thin end of that enormous wedge is the Internet and the likes of Trip Advisor, where self-appointed experts apparently cause horror stories complaining about the number of tea bags, or the position of the kettle in Bed and Breakfasts. In trying to set up potentially interesting pieces though, with prominent companies, that could be a little corrosive of your independence too. But there was also the fact that no journalists took travel writing very seriously, as they should have done, and often saw it as a chance for freebies, or a holiday from the real fight. Art though, and finding a real voice in writing, and travelling the world, is the fight too.

I fell very foul of The Telegraph when I was attacked by an editor, and many editors on the inside love their bits of power, for daring to be rude about Devon and Cornwall, although I wasn’t really. That was the impression that came out from a piece about history there, or England’s story, notably falling off our own maritime identity into American dreams and longings at “Westwood Ho”, that had been severely slashed in print, causing several “points of view” complaints from the public. Hey ho. Travel writing at its best is writing at its best, but rather than glossy food fests, posh hotels or book stunts like crossing the Atlantic in a bathtub, it should be brought back in print, if only as a leader to other articles more obviously engaged in selling things. One place that dedicates itself to travel writing as writing, almost purely in fine reprints, is Eland Books.

DCD

PA PRESS

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