Phoenix Ark's Blog

I wrote to Abrams yesterday about the digital rights in Fell, hoping to bring The Sight and Fell together in one now, but of course in their disrespect of writers, heard nothing. Say sorry too, Abrams, and heal something. I’ll keep you posted.

I’m also publishing this letter today, because just as all those emails from younger fans are an inspiration, so it’s true of adults. I nearly closed the lot down last week, but it’s not just about bloody me, losing touch with what matters in writing, you, and my vanity, or pride, it’s about the defence of the artist too. So I wish those artists and writers would also listen to Phoenix Ark about connection, and join in the debate and new creativity. Real voices are getting lost in the publishing swamp. To change a life is no small thing, so maybe fans will forgive me, and help me change myself back to who I am, or want to be!

Dear David,

Your work is simply an inspiration.

Let me start by saying that I do not read many books. But have read every single one of yours. All of your books have captivated me, especially “The Sight” and “Fell”. When I attended college, I used to travel by train. Many an early winter’s morning was spent passing the time away on the locomotive reading the books. The swift, snowy landscape in which I passed through only thrusting my physical form into the story, where my mind was already captivated. I have never forgotten the feeling of suspense and admiration I have for your characters. You have changed my life. And as an artist, share my utmost respect for you.

I am also a very devoted wolf lover, and would like to say that your books offer a much over-looked glimpse into the vulnerable nature of the often misunderstood creatures.

I long to see these fantastic stories perhaps come to the big screen, and to read your new work!

Lifelong Fan,
Tiffany

Thank you Tiffany, your letter is both moving and lovely. DCD

A friend wrote to me today on Facebook – ‘Isn’t it better to concentrate on the good you do, than the hurt you get?” Yes, of course. He also warned me against showing my ‘demons’ to younger fans, and that’s something I’m very aware of. It has made me post words and pull them away, because I don’t know who is reading this. Any writer shares their ‘demons’ and ‘angels’ in novels, they make good fantasy, but in a book they are allowed to do battle, and so come to resolution and meaning, and that was the process specifically denied to me in a novel that got far too close to real life. I’m sorry to younger fans if this blog upsets or disappoints, and delighted to hear anyone telling me to SHUT UP, as an old bore. The author is not the books, and many say never meet the author, but think of me and all the boring words on a blog as one of those grumpy, flawed, arguing ‘grown-ups’, you don’t need to understand, trying to bring it all home, and honour the fans as well.

It’s not just about my hurt though, it’s about the publishing industry. It’s about how real writers must be protected, how there is a sacred trust between an editor and author, and about how if loved characters are to live and do good in our hearts and imaginations, the unacknowledged legislators of the world, there cannot be too great a gap between what goes on on the page, or the values those pages contain, and what goes on among the people making those books, films or TV programmes. We really could learn a great deal as humans studying the fragility and loyalty of wolves. If people read between the lines of my ‘awful screed’, in a Letter to an American Editor, they might see the love and innocence that made this happen, an idealism as new as the extraordinary world, that is always reborn in the vision of the next generation, and very much mea culpa in this too, because love is also a wound we must sometimes be careful of. ‘When there’s no hatred in a mind, nothing can shake the linnet from the leaf” – but speaking what goes dark can also bring back light. Novels, paintings, music speak that to the world, despite the individual realities of everyday lives, caught in the partial moments of their conception. I cannot say enough how I lost myself, and must take responsibility for that. But innocence must grow into full responsibility too, real knowledge of each other, sometimes dark and light, while some sacred things were very badly challenged, and it was wrong.

If I can find a way back, even in my own shame and fear, anyone can, and the way back is talking to everyone and hiding from nothing now. Knowing too that girls and boys, men and women, we so deeply need each other. I’m extremely proud when I hear fans have been inspired, moved and especially helped, and it makes me angry with myself, but more so with publishers, editors and agents, who simply don’t see the trust they carry in the living world, in the scramble for loot. I became a child hurt by my own publisher, I mean that with great respect to all children, and don’t want hurt and disillusionment to be the real ‘child of our time’. It’s why I asked for poems and feelings about the fear and guilt adults engender in the young, with our talk of man’s destruction of nature, Gobal Warming, the end of the world, important as it is. It is a paradox, but we must love and understand each other too, as best we can, to really value extraordinary nature and protect it, since it’s where we come from. It’s another theme in Scream of The White Bear. That’s why I have to fight here for fans, me, books and against a really terrible culture that is developing, because otherwise I might as well give up writing. Anyone can write to a publisher here too, young or old, and they will be taken seriously, never judged wrongly, perhaps heard as a real friend, while there are many ways of doing good, in books and far beyond them too. I hope so, because that’s what Larka teaches Fell, and why Fell finds his own power to fight for himself, life and others too, and to ‘see in the dark’ as he tries to protect the feminine. I forgot masculine and feminine are first crucially inside us all. The greatest plot-line is the recovery of hope though, and the triumph over the real dark – meaninglessness, isolation and disconnection. DCD

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!