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With regard to a Letter to an American Editor, it is to take this hurt away forever, to release Ariel and Caliban, and so a poem by Blake is also published in the Poet’s Sweatshop – click

Since investment is near impossible in this awful climate, and we all need to make a living, Phoenix Ark will publish David Clement-Davies’ most loved novels digitally, certainly Fire Bringer and The Sight, and two new novels virtually, POD, or Publish on Demand, via Lulu, Amazon, and Kindle. They are the vampire thriller, The Blood Garden, and Michelangelo’s Mouse, both by David Clement-Davies. Although The Blood Garden is David’s first and newest incarnation as an adult thriller writer, in a long artistic struggle with today’s obsessive branding. In announcing this, Phoenix have to come clean, with knowing literary apologies, that previously published names were intended pen names! For Young Adult fans who have waited patiently for Scream of The White Bear, although it is far from ideal, we will also make it available in the not too distant future, POD. Books stand on their merits, but getting heard about too, so if any are to fly, again we depend on the word of mouth support of avid readers, for a brave if struggling little publisher!

The Blood Garden, by David C Davies, the adult pen name of the award winning Fantasy and Young Adult writer, David Clement-Davies, virtually creates a new genre, a vampire/detective novel, set in modern London. It is a departure from his Young Adult work, with powerfully adult themes, and a musing on love, death, fiction and vampires. Definately not one for children. Paul Romantin, a stylish but mysterious American actor, visiting the capital to star in The Witches of Eastwick, haunts more than the stage of the Lyceum Theatre. He is obsessed with the beautiful Russian Ballerina, Tatiana Chelakova. The dancer is in rehearsal for a performance of The Sleeping Beauty, at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, perhaps London’s greatest artistic holy of holies, steeped in its rich, red velvet. Meanwhile, a series of brutal murders begin, that seem to have a terrifying ritual purpose, as one of the lesser dancers is sucked into a tragic world of vice, sado-masochism and addiction. Adam First, a failing DCI with The Metropolitan Police’s Specialist Crimes Directorate, is called in to investigate, but soon begins to experience visions, that call into question his very sanity. Can a modern policeman really be seeing spectres in the great capital, ghosts from the bloody days of Jack the Ripper, or is he simply having a breakdown? Days on the cusp of scientific discoveries, that both shaped the modern police force, to usher in our ‘free’ but media obsessed and violent, unbelieving world, and helped form the troubled imagination of the creator of Dracula himself, Bram Stoker. Or was his bestselling tale of a murderous and evil Count imagination at all? (400 pages – Published by Phoenix Ark Press)

Michalengelo’s Mouse is an enchanting fable for younger readers, from the days of Renaissance Italy. Giotto is a mouse, but a mouse with a talent for art and drawing perfect circles. As the little Church of Popolo is closed for repairs, Giotto sets off to Florence, for an encounter with brigands, artists, cut-throats, princes, and none other than the great Michelangelo himself. (75 Pages – Published by Phoenix Ark Press)

We’re very miffed, me and the tea pot, with the miserable respone to Young Poets, but Dragon Post will also continue, so check it out

In the meantime, I’ve half a mind to start the Leave Mel Gibson Alone campaign. Not because I know the truth, that’s for a court, not trial by media, but because wasn’t someone in enough pain, who touched that kind of male disconnection inside? He was horrible to listen to, but you can’t understand it unless you’ve been there, or almost there, and the public front is often filled with so much bogus propriety. All is context, and I’m inclined to believe Whoopi Goldberg when she said of UK tv that he’s no racist. Catholic and conservative maybe, very good in Hamlet, and perhaps someone who doesn’t quite deserve skid row. Hey ho, skid row! Jo Orton said ‘never get caught’, but the truth is, never get lost, because hell’s on the inside first, and life ain’t nothing without a woman. Why do we f$%k each other up so much, and project onto each other all the time?

In the midst of a battle with my publisher, a ten year old boy wrote to me to ask me to always keep Fell safe in his travels. It had me in floods of tears, because Fell was me in NYC too, but Tarlar never came. But that isn’t true. The story is the story, and Fell and Tarlar travel on forever, side by side, seeing the light in the dark, and healed by each other, as powerfully alive and brave as many are. I’ve never been a quitter, and if Abrams can’t be true to the fans, or me, perhaps there’s a chink of light here still. I learnt yesterday that I of course own the digital rights to all my books, so Phoenix could theoretically publish Fire Bringer, The Telling Pool, and The Sight and Fell, together now, brought together again in one Kindle, Sony or E-book omnibus. Since my publishers shut the doors, perhaps that would reconnect me and a floundering little firm with my own stories, at least, if only online, and the writing wound would be less. But I have to make some kind of living, and need to know if there’s a public for that, and right now there isn’t. The connection is always the writer to the reader, the person who finds depth, insight, inspiration, fear, hope and beauty in the journey you try to go on. Of course editors are important, especially commissioning ones, but learn some humility too in front of the artist, successful and unsuccessful. Need to think over the weekend. DCD

I really loved many Americans I met, and yet in the end rather hated the disconnected swamp of America. Perhaps it was just such a rigid girl, with the check list of what deserved her love or loyalty, ‘the only way to do it’, but perhaps as with us all, so many seemed so lost and alone. Swept up in the size of it, and the ruthlessness of the machine, and crying out for greater depth. High school lock downs, maniacs on campus, disconnected malls, the brutal realities of city life, the great American dream. The sense of an immigrant consciousness, far more real than in Britain, understandably keen to leave European experiences behind, in a great modern act of forgetting and getting on. You could do with talking to more Europeans, but where is America now, though? The mid-west, New York, Washington, San Fran, Seattle, Texas? It was always my private joke that there’s a crack right down the middle of the Liberty Bell and always was, but when I visited, the War on Terror had turned that museum into an anti-room at Langley. A thing to see too, with little sense of history. But one place I won’t forget in New York is the shining little Aladin’s Cave of literature, Books of Wonder, the place the owner said to me ‘here comes trouble’. The trouble wasn’t me, it was a publisher over the street, and a heart torn every which way but loose. In their lock down, and defence of ‘rights’ and ‘proprierties’ over the really human, they threw all the wonder away, and tipped out the baby with the bath water. The story is the saddest one I’ve ever heard, and I was involved!

There should be a new station, perhaps Phoenix can start it, interpreting American news from the UK, back to Americans. Whether it’s Franzen on ‘freedom’ and publishing cock-ups, the death sentence in Texas, or the Bandwagon of ‘The Tea Party’, reported on Channel Four tonight, it would give a special take, and a different perspective, sometimes not expressible from inside America itself. To us the Tea Party summons images of a basic fight for freedom, against the terrible UK, until you remember America has the power now, and then find out quite how off the wall they are. Perhaps independent reporting would be hampered from this ‘channel’, by the extreme sense of injustice against a New York publisher though, and the bad boys of corporate America, because isn’t that what the Tea Party seem to be going on about? Still, few people are truly independent, not even Phoenix Ark, with our belief in the power of real human stories. Can’t they hold a Democratic Tea Party?

It becomes pretty dull being the angry voice in the wilderness, but it’s galling, and should be humiliating for such an established publisher as Abrams, to watch the novel Fell fall. With such great reviews, written incidently in the glow of love, and crossing Abram’s so-called ‘Mendoza line’ of bestsellers in Hardback, with over 45,000 sales, it should at least triple that in paperback. It happened with all my other books. Yet ‘strangely’, Fell has dropped to 31,000 at Barnes and Noble and 135,000 on Amazon, and of course, the author, intentionally painted by his ex, and then by a department trying to keep a secret, as in the wrong, is refused contact, and made a bystander to his own work. Does a publisher have any integrity whatsoever, and what can authors do about it, in a system so manifestly cynical, so disrespectful of literature and fans, and so utterly loveless? Since I can’t afford to sue them, I almost wish they would sue me, which they won’t because everything I have said is true. DCD