It was very important to resist the intimidation from UK lawyers about the Abrams story, complete hypocrisy too, even if it is crying in the wind. All people seem to fight about and for these days is money. But since two wrongs never make a right, and something very deep went wrong, as deep as you can go, the last, personal blog about Tara Break has been removed. When you get that kind of injustice happening at a publisher you want to shake the world, but none of it was right and something extremely sad indeed happened. Maybe with real courage and honesty to each other, one day we’ll start to wake up to just how remarkable we all are, and how connected too. Maybe one day Tara Break will realise just what she did and how different it all might have been, for several people.
PHOENIX ARK PRESS RELEASE – THE TERROR TIME SPIES
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
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
Filed under Adult Fiction, Childrens Books, Culture, The Arts, The Phoenix Story
SHAKESPEARE’S BROTHER – THE SCRIPT!
THE EDMUND SHAKEPSEARE BLOG
As part of the project here on Edmund Shakespeare, as promised, we are blogging the treatment that preceded a partially completed novel, but then the detailed research on Edmund Shakespeare and Southwark that should really build a history of an ‘unrecorded life’.
Apparently a script was read in Stratford last year that reached the Cohen Brother’s desk on Richard Shakespeare and another in the pipeline about Susanna.
SHAKESPEARE’S BROTHER
ACT I – O, PARDON! THE LOVELY BASTARD
1596-1599
It is spring, 1596, and a handsome 16 year old lad we mistake for Will Shakespeare, is trying to escape a life at home in provincial Stratford, rattling along the road to dreams and greatness in London. His thoughts are mixed with a montage of the opening of two theatres in Bankside and Blackfriars, where a children’s troupe becomes the Queen’s Choir, and of groundlings, nobles and critics, and the thunder of applause, or the pelt of vegetables. In London, Edmund Shakespeare arrives, and makes for the Curtain Theatre, in Shoreditch, walking in with the reverence of going into a church, to see the aging Edward Alleyn rehearsing the Prologue of Henry V – ‘Or may we cram, Within this wooden O, the very casques, That did affright the air at Agincourt? O, Pardon! Since a crooked figure may, attest in little place a million; And let us, ciphers to this great accompt, On your imaginary forces work…’
Edmund’s brother William, now 30, is in the middle of writing a new history, as a member of thrilling young troupe of actors, Lord Strange’s Men. The process of acting, rehearsing and rewriting, all together, is clear, but two years after they were closed because of plague, the theatres are open again, although the City of London has just banned them within its mile wide limits, and business is moving south, indeed London is on the move. The players are now in the hands of one of the ‘Liberties’, and, dangerously, South of the River, the influence of the just ascended Bishop of Winchester, Thomas Bilson, on payment of an annuity to Elizabeth of £400, in a world where offices were bought. A hawk against Catholic recusants, like Shakespeare’s own Grandfather Edward Arden, and hugely ambitious, Bilson ‘carried prelature in his very aspect’, a defender of the notion Christ descended into hell, the ‘Decensus Controversy’, not to suffer in sympathy with the ‘damned’, but to wrestle the keys of heaven from the devil.
We see the Bishop dining in his great hall in Southwark, a dead ringer for Antonio, in Measure for Measure, but it hides his Court’s apparent acceptance that a human hell can be maintained in London, with the Bishop of Winchester’s brothels, and the Clink prison next door, where the prisoners have to fund their own incarceration. The Church is much in play, at a time when the Elizabethan Religious Settlement is crucial, the Book of Common Prayer insisting children must be baptised, the first Sunday after their birth. While the likes of Arden had been executed for plotting against Queen Elizabeth, as his Catholic Son-in-law, John Sommerville, had been racked, and executed in The Tower. The Tower too looms over the whole drama, both literally and metaphorically for the high-born, a warning to over ambition. Elizabeth’s is an attempt at a more tolerant time, and stability too, but religion is a dangerous political tool, and eyes are everywhere still.
William Shakespeare is on the cusp of huge success though, with his plays starting to appear four years before, in 1592. It has already been a roller-coaster ride, and Edmund gives blessings, and a gift from their mother, Mary Arden, as we hear the line from the theatre, ‘We few, we happy few, we band of brothers….’ Will tries to persuade his baby brother against the dangerous, murderous and filthy city though, despite his affection for Ed, and the scheming, paranoid court.
He tells him simply to go straight home, to the healing countryside. To pretty Silvia, a local girl he grew up with, and they all thought Ed would marry. To go back to their mother, Mary Arden, and the pastoral ‘Forest of Arden’, of Stratford and Warwickshire, to get married, and make gloves! Ed’s loves are hunting deer, sitting by the mill chase, stealing apples, and running wild, and the seasons, blossom-fall, high summer, barren trees, blasted heaths, and deep snow will be much in evidence. We see they were the young Shakespeare’s loves too, and it is a constant theme of town versus country, hard city versus healing nature, as countrymen and women flood in along the Canterbury road, Chaucer’s road, at Borough, to make their ‘fortunes’ in town.
‘The theatre, Ed,’ Will asks Edmund, warily, ‘is the plague in your blood too?’, warning him too how hard it is to really make it as a player, because they are vain and fractious, jealous and backbiting, and in love with the ‘bubble reputation’. Perhaps he should go and see Gilbert, their brother also doing business in town. Edmund comments that Will is losing his hair.
To be continued…
Shakespeare’s Brother is in Copyright to David Clement-Davies and Phoenix Ark Press 2102 All RIghts Reserved
Filed under Free Story, The Arts
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
Filed under America and the UK, Childrens Books, Publishing, The Arts, The Phoenix Story
PA PRESS RELEASE – FREE MICE!
To celebrate this week’s publication of The Terror Time Spies by David Clement-Davies, based around the stories of The Scarlet Pimpernel, Phoenix Ark Press are delighted to announce free copies of another of David’s fables, Michelangelo’s Mouse, which you can get to kindle, downloadable free this Friday, August 3rd. Click here Happy reading.
Filed under Uncategorized
MITT ROMNEY AND KISS MY ARSE
Despite an addendum to the blog on the Romney Olympics remark, below, the reported comment of Romney’s Press Secretary “Kiss my arse” might be very humorous, until you remember that it was the such language to a Forbes Magazine reporter, from an Enron executive, that revealed the kind of arrogance that covered up the true darkness in Enron, and the biggest Corporate fraud in US history.
There is no suggestion here Romney is the bad businessman, like the Enron folk, but how can a serious Presidential candidate allow his people such an attitude and such comments? Bush displayed a notable arrogance or contempt towards the Press, and most politicians have a love-hate relationship with the Media, but at least Bush had ‘earned’ a Presidency. Romney’s camp clearly believe they have the right to rule and when anyone assumes that perhaps you know what you can expect.
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.
Filed under Culture, Publishing, The Phoenix Story
SHAKESPEARE’S BOOKES AND THE TEMPEST
The Edmund Shakespeare Blog
The end of Charles’s Nicholls’ The Lodger is very good on Shakespeare’s supposed swan song, The Tempest, when Prospero drowns his ‘bookes’ and breaks his staff. As both he and Peter Ackroyd point out, it was not his actual writing end, before his death in 1616, (the Earl of Oxford had died in 1604) and so instead Nicholls quotes Theseus’s lines from another little-read collaboration – The Two Noble Kinsmen
“O you heavenly charmers
What things you make of us! For what we lack
We laugh; for what we have are sorry; still
Are children in some kind. Let us be thankful
For that which is, and with you leave dispute
That are above our question. Let’s go off
And bear us like the time.”
Appropriate words for Phoenix Ark Press, perhaps! As Nicholls says, that does not mean that The Tempest was not his greatest swan song, but then, as so much in Shakespeare is about the art and artifice of theatre itself, and generative language too, Prospero is much about the magical engagement of the poet magician’s own psyche, meeting the intractable threat of real life and politics. The appeal beyond fragile art too, not half so real or true as when fact and fiction meet.
There were about 15 permanent theatres in London at the time, and the remains of The Curtain were uncovered in work on the London Olympics. But in the story of William and many other players, like his youngest and virtually unknown brother Edmund Shakespeare, that astonishing flowering of poetry and theatre in London and Southwark was soon to be swept away by the Puritans, and Civil War, or find its channels in other more aristocratic rivers. Closed winter theatres, like the one Shakespeare and The Globe sharers were developing in Blackfriars, brought more expensive seats, the introduction of candlelight, one day to become ‘the limelight’, and so changed the shape of playwriting too, into formal acts. Theatre also moved towards London’s ‘West End’ – the City was pushing that way – with theatre’s like Beeston’s Cockpit, and developing Drury Lane.
But by the 1640’s The Swan theatre in Paris Gardens in Southwark, built by Francis Langley, was described as hanging down its head “like a dying Swan.” The Globe, that had burnt down in 1613 and was rebuilt, had gone by 1642. Later reformers would associate the site with a Baptist meeting-house, but if, for the morally minded, the ‘sinful miasmas’ of the theatres had been happily expelled, what really drove the development of the area now was the hugely lucrative brewing business, as individual ‘taps’ were driven out, and everything went through the guts of kings, beggars and London Citizens alike. So those ‘player’s fictive worlds were vanishing under their entertaining feet!
If Shakespeare, during the Reformation, did turn away from Marlowe’s darker revolts and investigations, that fiery playwright spy, to the purposeful prosperity of secular theatre and sought futures, perhaps he also echoed Dr John Dee’s turning from alchemy and the occult too. It seems that in writing about London, a skillful fiction writer like Peter Ackroyd, who wrote a novel about John Dee, has himself touched the potential darkness of that imagining. Shakepseare’s astonishing alchemies are of the heart, most interested in working effects on an audience, so he is always concerned with real love, and the effect of the play in engaging with life. Summoning too though those mythic ‘Gods’ of a classical imagination and belief, powerfully real forces inside such a psyche, before any pseudo ‘science’ of psychology had been invented, but knowing in The Tempest, and the flow and tide of time, that everything dissolves in the end, except the play itself:
“Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.”
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:
Fire Bringer:
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
Filed under Publishing, The Arts, The Phoenix Story, Young Adult
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