The Warlock

New novel for you to review. Go to http://www.authonomy.com/ViewBook.aspx?bookid=13311

Evil is alive and well. Demons exist. I know, for I have seen them. I have fought them and they are very real.

On the advice of his doctor, Allan Collins, an over-worked executive takes a sabbatical at the monastery of Agios Dimitrios on the lonely Grecian island of Melanos. Collins meets Vincent Marat; a balding, middle-aged man of great wealth, impeccable taste and magnetic personality who has surrounded himself with a strange assortment of house guests, including the beautiful Alberta, the saturnine Diego and the self-absorbed twins. It is a menagerie of the unordinary, even the displaced, as Collins feels he has walked through the looking glass into some fanciful and erotic land. Brother Evangelos, the Abbot of Agios Dimitrios, warns him that he should not be taken in; that Vincent Marat is a dangerous man, a diabolist and he should be on his guard at all times. Collins heeds his advice but still finds it hard to see Marat, who calls himself Ipsissimus, the highest grade of magician, as more than an egotistical and hedonistic deviant.

Maxim Gunn

All you armchair adventurers, you frustrated highwaymen, would-be spies and knights in shining armour with no damsels in distress and not a dragon in sight, take comfort because Maxim Gunn can take you where before you went only in your dreams.

Ryerson's Process

The opening pages of my new novel ...

Hard, wet sand. Sea smells. Sounds of wavelets susurrating. Onomatopoeic, alliterative words, poetic words. Pain. Not poetic. Hard fact; as hard as the sand. More words rising unbidden through the mists of slowly emerging consciousness. ‘And comes at night to die upon the sand.’ Wrong. Out of context. No sea smells beyond the Oxus. No sea smells in the desert. No Oxus river any more. What was it called now? Think dammit, think!
I gave up. Thinking was too difficult. Was this what death was like? Pain came again, in waves, not wavelets. Nothing poetic about pain, no gentle susurration; just hurt, and hard, wet sand under my back. The pain of death? Wrong kind of pain: punishment, penalty, price. This was pain as in ‘I wish the goddam thing would go away and stop trying to rip the top of my head off.’ Tennyson, Alfred Lord T. ‘death who puts an end to pain.’ No pain after death, therefore I wasn’t dead. And anyway, heaven surely didn’t smell of garlic.
No relief after that logical conclusion. And what did heaven smell of? Scented or unscented; could you take your pick? Left staircase unscented; right side: attar of roses, Je Reviens, My Sin. No. My Sin would be the other place: a touch of promise, dark eyes, raven hair, red lips and a hint of perfume to offset the choking pungency of brimstone.
Dammit, leave me alone. I’m thinking: great, momentous, ineffably philosophic thoughts. Should have put up a sign. ‘Do not disturb.’ Why can’t people read? Didn’t put up the damned sign, that’s why. Like my old school master said. ‘Could do better if he tried harder.’ Memory like a leaky can. Make a note. Put up sign next time; but right now, will you for God’s sake damned well leave me alone.
“Is he dead?”
Bloody silly question. Of course he - I - wasn’t dead. We’ve just been through all that; explained it logically. No pain after death. Ergo, he’s - I’m - not dead. I was, however, in danger of losing the top of my head. Any second and it would take off, a flap lifting like a pressure cooker blowing: Stromboli, Etna, Vesuvius, spewing a molten lava of brains. Then I’d be dead, and it would be Attar of Roses - or My Sin if the other fellow got me - but definitely not garlic.
Hard fingers pressed my neck and I shrank. No more pain. The head was bad enough. A pulse throbbed, blood restricted under the fingers.
“No, just unconscious.”
A different voice: stronger, more authoritative, not tentative and worried like the first, and with it attar of garlic. What the hell happened to the roses, and why was it speaking in Spanish?
“He’s been mugged?”
“Maybe. Someone ran. Did you see them?”
“No. It’s too dark, but I think there were three.”
The hard fingers relaxed. No strangulation tonight. Just the pain, and a gusty exhalation of garlic.
“It doesn’t matter. Go and call an ambulance.”

Survival mode

People need time to adapt to new codes of morality. Wars, disasters, poverty; all these bring about altered states of living and thinking, and with them comes the strongest force of all: survival. And with survival the first priority, people revert and the veneer of civilization is stripped by the acid of personal need. The one becomes more important than the whole.

Road without maps

There is no roadmap for writers. There’s no arrow saying “You are here”, with a lot of other signs pointing to other places you may or may not want to go. You can only look back at where others have been and learn. Then you must go into the unknown, the places marked on the map “Here there be dragons”. This is the only way to progress in your journey, because to stay on the well-trodden path is merely to revisit what has already been done. Exploration will find your unique voice.

That demned elusive grammar

Grammar and punctuation and tenses, are all very well and proper, but anyone who knows anything about words knows to expect anything from them. They are living things, and like all such hate to be confined. They should be allowed to run free, and if this offends grammarians, so be it: it is their loss, the words do not care, and nor should writers. All that is important is meaning and understanding and enjoyment.

Periphrastic, pleonastic or redundant

In the various arts, and above all in writing, the shortest distance between two points, even if close to each other, has never been and never will be, what is known as a straight line, never, never, to put it strongly and emphatically in response to any doubts, to silence them once and for all. (Jose Saramago - The Stone Raft)

Phew, and I thought it was just me!