‘HO, HO, HO’ and here’s another for those stocking fillers. This whole weekend, December 15th and 16th, get a FREE copy of a Classic Co-edition, THE SIGHT and FELL, on your Kindle. Keep it in your calendar, then just CLICK HERE
Then remember, THE GODHEAD GAME will also be FREE, for three whole apocalyptic days, around the MAYAN END OF THE WORLD, December 21st-December 23rd! CLICK HERE
A VERY HAPPY CHRISTMAS AND NEW YEAR FROM PHOENIX ARK PRESS
Filed under Adult Fiction, Childrens Books, Fantasy, Free Story
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
Filed under America and the UK, Books, Childrens Books, Fantasy
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
Filed under America and the UK, Books, Childrens Books, Publishing, The Phoenix Story
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
Filed under America and the UK, Books, Childrens Books, London, New York, Publishing, The Phoenix Story
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….
Filed under America and the UK, Books, Childrens Books, Culture
Phoenix Ark Press are delighted to publish The Terror Time Spies, by David Clement-Davies.
It is 1793 and Henry Bonespair and his little sister Spike are about to make a very dangerous journey to French Revolutionary Paris. It is Henry Bonespair’s birthday too and the leader of The Rat Catchers, a bold young gang of loyal friends, who love imitating the daring exploits of a rumoured English hero, The Scarlet Pimpernel, has just received a special present from his father’s employer, William Wickham. But in giving Henry Bonsepair his fabulous silver Chronometer, Wickham has his own dark motives, involving a plot top end the Revolution in a stroke, and a shadowy group of Royalists called The League of The Gloved Hand, as strange and ghostly voices are heard around his estate.
When the great trip is suddenly cancelled though, a boring English summer threatens to consume the Rat Catchers, until a pretty French girl staying on the estate is kidnapped by Revolutionary spies. So the children decide to take matters into their own hands, and in a moonlit barn form a brand new gang to help her. The soon-to-be hugely famous Pimpernel Club is born and a series of thrilling adventures begins that not only involves ships, coaches, guillotines, highwaymen and balloons, but a magical watch that may take them travelling through time itself.
Reading age 8-13
The Terror Time Spies is published exclusively to Amazon Kindle at $5.99 and available here
Phoenix Ark Press is a member of the IPG, The Independent Publisher’s Guild
Filed under Books, Childrens Books, Fantasy, Young Adult
So, with The Terror Time Spies waiting in the wings, it’s time, especially for Tiffany, Barbara and Dinah, and all readers who have been so kind, to get all animalistic again and wrestle with Scream of the White Bear.
The state of play with Phoenix Ark Press is that we have had over 32,000 visits, published some great cultural essays, kicked against the publishing houses and taken back the electronic rights in Fire Bringer, The Sight, Fell and The Telling Pool, from Macmillan, Bloomsbury, Penguin US and Abrams. We have loudly voiced opposition to the way authors are being treated, to breaches of Contract, to the negligence and arrogance of big firms, and to being intimidated by Abrams via a UK Law Firm.
We have kept our word too, (it would be nice from editors who claim to care for culture or story, or even partners and friends) built a small publisher, published a unique co-edition of The Sight and Fell, the great Ice by Dominic Sands, Leonardo’s Little Book of Wisdom, chosen and edited by Foreman Saul, The Godhead Game, and posted up unique work on Edmund Shakespeare, given out free stories and poetry for the spirit of writing, and now comes The Terror Time Spies too! We may be broke, and disillusioned with what people are capable of, but though tired we are not dead, bowed, not beaten, and perhaps one day the experience of other authors and artists ‘out there’ will bring them into the fold. But it’s great to have you along, though now we’re taking a little holiday in the sun! Just dream with us of good miracles.
PA Press
Filed under Adult Fiction, Childrens Books, Culture, The Arts, The Phoenix Story
Isn’t interesting that in such dark times, (since the Twin Towers came down, perhaps,) my own editor and now Abrams Vice President, Sarah van More, could not defend a series of children’s books, starting with the novel coming this week, The Terror Time Spies, that were designed to help kids deal with a climate of fear?
The actual value of a story was irrelevant, in their ‘defence’ of editorial power, that wrecked a career and removed a publisher too. I argued, as I had with a partner and ‘so-called’ friend, that a lot of it was about American consciousness these days, projecting fear, but also massive arrogance, and a quality of selfishness and lack of depth too, that some have called Ego Consciousness. ‘Our rights’, but no-one else’s, and engaging the full weight and threat of a system. That projection is understandable in a climate of world terror and conflict, wherever it comes from, but not for a second in a world of children’s and Young Adult books.
Perhaps my anger was actually frightening, at times, but when a publisher is trying to publish a novel with ‘no contact with the author’, actually to mask the legal dispute that had developed, you really are in the realms of Kafka, or just plain tyranny and cruelty. In this case a business tyranny as bad as any other. Tara Break’s projected life fears were enormous, perhaps out of the darkness in her own strange family, and a terror of standing up too. But when a CEO, Mike Jacobson, threatens an author, fighting for their career out of so many personal betrayals, and on their own in London, with ‘issuing attorney’s notices in New York and London’, but also suggests that I had ‘some other motive’, as if I was some terrorist, then something very odd is going on. At one point I joked that that New York madness would involve delivering a literary manuscript in an armoured car!
The abuse of power was later reflected by instructing an entire department not to read a blog, as a publisher denied dialogue on books already there. The whole thing, for a year of trying to work, was because Tara Break would not put away an accusation that was a complete distortion of the events that led up to her changing a number, and the reasons for them. That jaunt through the fields of publishing, writing, true love or friendship cost me everything, and her publisher Howard Reeves his job too, but then she was hand in glove with my editor, Sarah Van More. Who, in her own collapsing life relationships, not only chose to ‘defend’ Tara Break, but invade her own author, breach his trusts to another publisher, Sharyn Novembre at Penguin, and apply no decent or equitable principle, in her scramble for power. The question remains of who the mystery man was, in the mix, who never had the guts to stand up to this supposed bully, and if he actually works at Abrams too.
But the real ‘Terrorism’ was the ferocious and ultimately cynical politics inside Abrams. It was how they both judged and accused without allowing any kind of proper hearing too. How they abused the principles of authorial respect, proper working conditions, emotional safety, freedom of speech, and honest dialogue too, to serve Tara Break’s interests entirely. Why exactly do they publish anything – for the money and their careers alone? In the end I couldn’t take their devil’s pact of silence for success, as they disrespected all their contracts too, so I walked away. Let’s hope, in taking so much poison out, and now publishing one of those three novels too, we can sweep away the awfulness and rebuild.
But if an American CEO can try to lie about the real issues to the US Author’s Guild as well, and promote Sarah Van More over Harold Roves, then under his leadership Abrams are a publisher that cares about nothing, and America will make its world reputation worse and worse. America is a free country, a great democracy, at root, and I once thought Abrams an extremely fine publisher, but If you think it’s an unimportant story because it is ‘only’ about books, or one person’s livelihood, imagine what could happen if innocence or personal freedom were involved? It does happen, in ‘real’ life, and in often frightening America.
DCD
Phoenix Ark Press
Filed under America and the UK, Childrens Books, Publishing, The Arts, The Phoenix Story
In a few days time Phoenix Ark are proud to publish The Terror Time Spies by David Clement-Davies. Based loosely on the exploits of The Scarlet Pimpernel, by Baroness Orczy, during the French Revolution, it sends a daring band of youngsters to Paris, to confront Terror everywhere. Though intended as the first in a much lighter, entertaining series, it was the book that Sarah Van More had had for nearly two years at Abrams, and would have taken an absurd four years to publish, since signing a contract, if that battle had not happened. There we are.
In the ‘good ol’ days, its publication would have meant lovely things like proper editorial support and dialogue, proof copies, interviews and author’s copies, arriving in brown cardboard boxes, to grace a private bookshelf. The stuff of real life books, that are things and characters in themselves too, not to mention becoming a record of others’ reading joys and histories. All part of those enormously special and intimate things to any author though, made far more intimate by a two year relationship with an Abrams editor, Tara Break, and by a ten year editorial relationship with her colleague. Which was once a source of joy and pride, made all the more tragic in the weird atmosphere of an American firm, of not even being ‘allowed’ to mention it, as if some crime had been committed. But so Phoenix Ark Press was born, and now, because at present they are only to eBook, publishing means, beyond the work of course – creative, editorial and the wonderful cover too, designed by Seb and Julia – the literal press of a button.
The Internet has revolutionised publishing in a way perhaps only comparable to Shakespeare’s day, over four hundred years ago, viz-viz other work here, the creation of The Stationer’s Register in London, that closed only so recently, developing copyright law itself, and, in a sense, the creation of the very idea of ‘the author’. There are many bad things in it, on the Internet too, but many good, like people who did not read hugely, suddenly saying their Kindles or readers had opened entire worlds, and at least it has kept Phoenix Ark alive as a creative voice. It’s massive downside is Amazon’s proud trumpeting of the fact that Borders has declared bankruptcy and the pumping out of work that perhaps should not see the light of day. Perhaps publishing was always rather ruthless, battles of books deeply personal too, and nothing ensures a work’s surival. Perhaps the only thing that really matters is not how we read, but the quality of the stories we are reading, although physical books will never die and we must be very wary indeed of breaking vital human connections. The Terror Time Spies coming soon.
PA PRESS
Filed under Childrens Books, Fantasy, The Phoenix Story
Well, there you are. The Huffington Post announces that ‘Working Culture’ is making Britis ‘Sick, stressed and depressed‘Click here. Meanwhile banking crisis follows banking crisis, as those with their snouts in the trough run off with the cash, but the system affects everyone. Bob Diamond resigns over the Libor fixing and the HSBC is involved in drugs money laundering. Not to mention the corporate scandal of G4S in the Olympics, and David Cameron promising to ‘go after them’. That is a National scandal too, at the moment World attention is turning to London.
Perhaps, as FBI system’s man Danian Fabian gets an email, in the thriller The Godhead Game, inviting him to ‘change his life forever‘, we should all follow suite. Especially connected to systems like the Internet, even blogging, that probably disconnect lives more and more. So a world game begins, involving the Mayan Calendar and the ‘End of the World‘, this year, 2012. If we are all in need of a bit of moral or spiritual renewal, maybe The Godhead Game is another clue. It is available at Amazon.com or Click here
Fire Bringer, US Edition, is also available for FREE download today Click here
Filed under America and the UK, Books, Childrens Books, Thrillers
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