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Maybe wolves were an issue, not to mention polar bears! Certainly painted awfully in the old christian language of Good and Evil, Dark and Light, and in Medieval days even put on trial. Poor Red Riding Hood, in Angela Carter’s adult Fairy Tales, padding in the Company of Wolves. Transformed under a lunatic moon, out of a man into a werewolf. Altered States, like that Kronenberg movie about love and trust. David was neither Larka, nor actually Fell, but more Fell than Larka, since he had no sisters!

Wolves are remarkably like pack driven humans, in some ways, except that despite those alphas, betas and omegas, they seem not to abandon their own, especially when injured. The song of the wild wolf, and then the rising pack, is one of the most haunting in all nature. They are far more powerful than dogs, genetically, with jaws that have something like ten times the bite. Up in a wolf stanctury in Colorado, when what DCD had thought what was his pack, his home, back in NYC, and never was, had shut him out, he heard a lovely tale. Of how one had died and his mate lay down to grieve. That evening, when she (or he?) cried to the moon, the others stayed eerily silent.

As elephants seem to pass the bones of dead elephants between their trunks, as if asking some strange question, coming to consciousness, with their bodies. As Giant Squid flaring bright red, in anger or fear, turn blue when approached with care and intelligence. The Supernature of life is astonishing, but if we think we are always so right, we have another thing coming. But as for favourite animals here, why not the dolphin, those brilliantly fast and playful healers of the sea? Is it true they hunt sharks and can stun or kill by slamming nose first into them? To listen to the crack crack crack of Dolphin chatter in sparkling water is wonderful, like the huge, hauntingly deep and longing song of whales. DCD should have been given the chance to write a book on dolphins and ancient Crete called The Sacred Swimmers.

But there you go, adopt a company animal like the dolphin and live in water and sunlight!

PA Press

Also available on Utube at http://youtu.be/Z62x9mzO5NA

Phoenix Ark Press openly invites Abrams to privately answer the question of whether the always missing person in a strange puzzle, actually works at Abrams too. If that is true, then politics is a very nasty business indeed, but a great many scales will fall from a great many clouded eyes. It would explain something that could not have been cowardice, or compassion either. Still, easily answered. A publisher engaged in appalling abuse, especially of the spirit of the child inside an author, but of many basic principles. They should all actually read Fell and understand most precisely why, and it’s free tomorrow! Young adult or any good writing isn’t some game you write the cheque for, then expect certain delivery, it demands the right conditions. But with secrets, dark fears, or misunderstandings so much there, there is actually only one person alive who, with courage, could possibly heal it now. Fear always kills. No prayers have ever been answered there before though, so a person and Abrams will ignore many ‘unbelievable’ truths, and the God or Devil language they misuse daily, and stand over continued harm.

(Ammended)

Phoenix Ark Press

We are delighted to announce the promotion of two titles, FREE. The first is The Sight and Fell co-edition, available tomorrow, June, 21st, to celebrate the solstice and longest day. The second is The Godhead Game, although that is actually available the day after, June 22nd. Both are available for download from Amazon.com.

Although the UT time and date is this evening, it stretches to the 22nd.

Phoenix Ark Press

Th warrior of light has learned that it is best to follow the light.

He has behaved treacherously, he has lied, he has strayed from the path, he has courted darkness. And everything is fine, as if nothing had happened.

Then the abyss suddenly opens up: you can take a thousand steps in safety, but just one step too many can put an end to everything. Then the warrior stops before he destroys himself.

When he makes that decision, he hears four comments. “You always do the wrong thing. You’re too old to change. You’re no good. You don’t deserve it.”

He looks up at the sky. And a voice says ‘My dear, every one makes mistakes. You’re forgiven, but I cannot force that forgiveness on you. It’s your choice.”

The true warrior of light accepts that forgiveness.

Paulo Coelho

On a far sillier and happier note, readers, especially younger ones, are not interested in the privates lives of mad, disgraced authors, or the stupidness of adults, only in a good story. The Terror Time Spies was that story held up at Abrams and it was specifically written to try and help younger valiants, with so much terror and fear in the world. If truth be told, it was also intended as the start of a much lighter and funnier series than the label of epic author that was earned or stamped on a writer’s head, and with the gorgeous hope of making a lot of money too, and buying everyone an ice cream!

It is set during that blood soaked Reign of Terror, during the French Revolution, and is loosely based around the wonderfully dasterdly deeds of The Scarlet Pimpernel. It is almost ready, so do enjoy the cover and please be assured that like other promises, often delayed, in the battle to be and breathe again like a human being, it is coming soon…

Phoenix Ark Press

There are painting works in the office, shiny new bookshelves and that intimate business of rearranging all the stories, histories and reference works too. It made me think how sad these last few years have been, and how what to one writer happened in America was perhaps the death knell of a whole generation. Especially since it coincided almost eerily with a world banking crisis. It is a delight to hear people talking with passion about their Kindles or readers, about all they can access so quickly and above all about discovering a passion for stories and reading itself. But Phoenix Ark are rather older school and have been a reluctant bride in the e World.

Books are not just the stories inside them, they are like people, personalities and their physical entities contain memory and experience in themselves. Sometimes that is very personal, from annotations, to rediscovered postcards popped inside, from special pages turned down, to well remembered gifts. Those memories can be as happy or as painful as that business of doing your tax returns after a split up, and recalling last year’s cost. But physical books are of course also things of enormous work, thought and beauty. They are stamped by the people who got together to create them, from author to editor to designer and artists, and most specifically carry the mark of their particular moment, and then their successive reinterpretation by future generations, if they survive. Will that not all be lost in the swilling multiverse, where actually words are now also representations of numbers and binary code on a screen?

So, seeking advice from Amazon recently about their own printing facility Createspace, it was with a great deal of ennui that we heard a bullish, however helpful and friendly, American voice urging us toward eBooks publishing, rather than print. Declaring too that last year Borders were forced into Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Amazon created a monster with the specific intention, if you read reports from the US Author’s Guild, of dominating bookselling, then dominating the new platforms and wiping out rivals. Capitalism may take no prisoners, and big publishers are increasingly ruthless too, driving profits with series and bestsellers, but if Amazon cannot see that the closure of Borders is a cultural tragedy, then they have no idea what it is about at all, and that is certainly not just money. A bookshop, a physical space, like a good library, is as much about the joy of interacting, browsing, discovery and allowing all those true things it is about, namely life out there, from flirting to arguing to having an adventure. For authors too there are many negatives about the supposed ‘Democratisation’ of ‘print’ possibility, because culture, real shared culture, takes excellence and is not just some kind of endless white noise.

Perhaps this is just a moment. Perhaps somehow bookshops, Independent and Chain, will resurface, when we are all glutted with eBooks and wonder what happened to human beings, when everyone on earth is working for the machine in a gigantic call centre. The quality of what people read is vital, so champion the story in the E World, but as for those wonderful things on shelves too, the book is dead, long live the book!

DCD

Phoenix Ark Press are delighted to announce the publication to Kindle of the US editions of Fire Bringer and The Sight by David Clement-Davies which were originally published by Penguin in America, in what was effectively a breach of contract, and part of the extraordinary disrespect to authors going on everywhere now.  

There are slight variations in the US and UK editions, so we are pleased to say we can offer Phoenix Readers free copies on five days in the next three months.  The first free download will be announced shortly.  The new Co-edition of The Sight and Fell will be available soon.

PA Press

Coming Soon:  Partly prompted by the searches on here and by the actions of Oxford lawyers attempting to threaten a writer, David Clement-Davies has decided to serialise all the events, so called privacies, actions, lies and misrepresentations that occurred at Abrams in New York, over four years.  It makes for very astonishing reading.

PA PRESS