Category Archives: The Phoenix Story

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 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 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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August 1, 2012 · 4:46 pm

THE PHOENIX STORY – THE STATE OF PLAY

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

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August 1, 2012 · 12:26 pm

ABRAMS AND TERRORISM

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

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July 31, 2012 · 1:01 pm

INTRODUCING ‘THE BLOGGING BLOG’

Along with The Edmund Shakespeare Blog, Phoenix Ark Press are now delighted to introduce ‘The Blogging Blog’. It will involve tips about publishing, encouragements and warnings to writers about blogging itself, discussions of any real cultural value, or whether Sir Tim Berners Lee’s Internet, so highlighted at The London Olympics by Danny Boyle, actually connects or disconnects. Hopefully it can be a valuable forum about writing, blogging, journalism and voices on the Net, but that depends crucially on you the reader too, so bloggers experiences and insights are much encouraged. We will give away some of the experiences and thrills and spills of Phoenix Ark’s publishing venture too.

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July 29, 2012 · 10:30 am

REPLYING TO TIFFANY B

Hi Tiffany,

thanks for writing again. I’m very positive about Phoenix, readers’ kind and interested responses, and trying to let the issue ‘go’, but some very deep principles indeed were abandoned in this, both in life and in publishing. The astounding fear generated in New York around it has much to say of our times, perhaps, and a harm that can spread well beyond something as apparently unimportant as books. I did not behave very well, at times, but Abrams did something that was not only inhuman but actually breached essential US legal, even Constitutional principles. That’s why it’s flagged at the top of a blog. It is boring and repetitive sometimes, even damaging to put it there, but it was also blind and unnecessary. It is people who make the ‘systems’ we hide in or blame, and people who stand over real harm, or actually cruelty. In other examples that can go really dark. Abrams could and should make it right, but never will, and it is also about the sad climate in Publishing nowadays. As for The Sight 3, that would have happened too. I was told in the middle of it, by my editor Susan Van Metre, now Abrams VP, that fans ‘would love’ a sequel to Fell, and wrote a proposal, but that too was jettisoned, in a completely inadequate response to another book there and an editor’s ‘power over her list’, as my time and fans were disrespected.

As for my stories, Fell, Kar, you’ve hit a nail on the head. But Fell was the novel written at a wonderful time, that a person refused to even read, once talked about in warm jokes during editorial, but later part of awful invasions, by both an ex and my own editor, side by side. No writer or artist can be forced to function under those shocking conditions. No one can be dictated to like that, but see such dreadful and cynical hypocrisy. I hope they wake up to the harm they did, not only involving me but Howard Reeves. Nor was the story only about Abrams, but friendships back in London, and a laziness and emotional negligence that well reflected the passions and rivalries of wolf packs! Wolves though also seem to look after their own. Let’s move on and tell better stories about many things. Thank you for the encouragement, fans are only and rightly interested in the quality of stories, not the back room business of publishing, which here got straight into the front room.

all very best, DCD

To David Clement-Davies

I know Abrams stung you right through the middle but (being positive) forget about them. Your on this site now, your releasing ebooks on Amazon. Your doing wonderful for yourself. Look up reviews on amazon on paperback on some of your books:

The Sight:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Sight-David-Clement-Davies/product-reviews/0142408743/ref=cm_cr_dp_all_helpful?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending

Fire Bringer:

http://www.amazon.com/Fire-Bringer-David-Clement-Davies/product-reviews/0142408735/ref=cm_cr_dp_all_summary?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending

These reviews are not towards the publisher but to your work. The Sight has about 182 reviews.

Forget about The Man and continue this site’s great future.

You have my fan love, I don’t care about a publisher when I read a book I only care about the story, how it’s written, how character personalities are written and their situations. For a good example: Kar from The Sight, Kar is dragged away from his family when The Balker kidnap his siblings by Skop and adopted into Larka’s family and he seemingly accepts what he’s got before being separated from Larka and having to turn lone but calls Huttser father near the end when reunited with his pack.

I remember The Sight like it was a movie. I think it’s your best. Fire Bringer was good too but for me, I personally love dogs more then deer.

I hope Sight 3, will happen one day and you can give us the epilogue where Fell and Tarlar and puppies. Puppies would insure Fell’s happiness I think he needed it after the end of Fell, Kar needs to be with Larka. I’m sorry but I can’t imagine any other wolf with him.

This is the ending I’d write as a fan but my plot and layout planning sucks.

Hope this encourages you keep on your future track. All the best.

Tiffany B, A fan

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July 24, 2012 · 5:26 pm

PHOENIX ARK PRESS AND PUBLISHING AT THE PUSH OF A BUTTON!

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

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July 24, 2012 · 5:19 pm

DISPATCHES, BANKING SCANDALS, ABRAMS AND THE GODHEAD GAME

John Snow’s report on banking corruption on Dispatches last night made chilling viewing. It underpins ideas in the thriller The Godhead Game that World Markets have become a super casino, especially since the financial ‘Big Bang’, where players get in and out quick, and the business of banking has become much about whoever can get their snout in the trough. 75% of those polled said they do not trust banks. Well, if that ‘culture’ actually has the capacity to implicate everyone, in a world out of step, then a story about the Mayan ‘end of the world’ this year, and part satire, also proposes a way that World Markets themselves might be beaten! To get a copy Click here

As we have said before though, what happened with the publisher Abrams in 2008 was not unrelated to various kinds of collapse, while there were extraordinary synchronicities in other ways. When David Clement-Davies talked to editor Tara Break about interconnections though, after personal and professional betrayal, her Hew, Screw and Glue put at the heart of a firm, and the mounting financial crisis too, her only comment, or awareness of a world beyond herself and her ‘rights’, was “I don’t have any shares.” No shares in anything it seems though, including Publisher’s and author’s work and careers – exes, friends or otherwise. But when unwanted whistleblowers appear in the banking sector, at least they can fight back and are compensated.

Harold Rove’s removal as Publisher and Vice President at Abrams, although he most certainly tried to do the right thing, is proof of the scandal there, that coalesced around the ambition and long alliance of Tara Break and Sarah Van More. Yet David Clement-Davies has received neither apology, nor compensation for such enormous harm. Not only is he owed a great deal, with five novels so damaged, so much time and work abused,but when truth dies at a major US publishing firm, creating conditions of arguable criminal conspiracy, then the rot has gone everywhere.

Abrams publish hugely successful books like The Diary of A Whimpy Kid series, but perhaps it follows that the only real principle they supported was the power and rights of their editors over their own contracted authors,and the value not of the meanings inside their books and stories, but of sales and clinking cash tills. It was ultimately overseen by a man with his own agenda too, Mike Jacobson, and as suggested in a recent blog, by extension one of the heads of an entire publishing family, Herve de la Martiniere. From the actions of Macmillan UK and Penguin US too over eBook rights, meanwhile Sarah Van More breaching essential privacies to Sharyn Novembre at Penguin US, but mouthing on so arrogantly and hypocritically about silence, from an author who could not walk away, David has also seen how some big publishers treat authors as pure commodity, unless they are big enough to set an agenda, and ride roughshod over their rights and, crucially in this case, vital healthy working conditions. In such a world, the visions in valuable stories die too, and real free speech with it. No artist under contract and trying to write meaningful literature, can be expected to function under dishonest, threatening and harmful conditions, or, to quote a rather extreme analogy, used by the Nobel playwright Joshua Sobel, “no theatre in a graveyard!”

DCD

Phoenix Ark Press

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July 19, 2012 · 2:50 pm

BEAMINSTER TRAGEDY

Since Phoenix Ark is partly the record of things as they really happen, in fact and fiction, and stories that seem to follow, like perhaps being one of the few writers talking about 16th Century London and Shakespeare with the odd distinction of really came close to the Black Death, in the story about Eric York in the Grand Canyon, just a note about the pretty Dorset town of Beaminster and the recent tragedy. 

I drove up on Monday in the rain, to hear that the tunnel on the A3066 had collapsed. That day the friend I’m staying with had been told about a missing local couple, as people started to worry about a crash.  On Tuesday it suddenly appeared on the Internet and in The Huffington Post, that a car had been found at the tunnel, buried in a heavy mud slide. A body had been found. With respect to the families in Beaminster, we won’t say any more, except perhaps that at least the older couple were together. Since they were missing for a week though, the case is being referred to the IPPC, The Independent Police Commission.

 

PA PRESS

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