The Bridge Builder by Will Allen Dromgoole

An old man, going a lone highway,
Came, at the evening, cold and gray,
To a chasm, vast, and deep, and wide,
Through which was flowing a sullen tide.

The old man crossed in the twilight dim;
The sullen stream had no fear for him;
But he turned, when safe on the other side,
And built a bridge to span the tide.

“Old man,” said a fellow pilgrim, near,
“You are wasting strength with building here;
Your journey will end with the ending day;
You never again will pass this way;
You've crossed the chasm, deep and wide-
Why build you this bridge at the evening tide?”

The builder lifted his old gray head:
“Good friend, in the path I have come,” he said,
“There followeth after me today,
A youth, whose feet must pass this way.

This chasm, that has been naught to me,
To that fair-haired youth may a pitfall be.
He, too, must cross in the twilight dim;
Good friend, I am building this bridge for him.”

• By Etienne de L'Amour ~ Google+

Excerpt from Thank You, I Understand: First chapter

1. The morning after the night before

It was quite late in the morning by the time Rocky Rhodes finally made it into town, little knowing that he had a first appointment with destiny that day, and as yet still blissfully ignorant of the fact that his every move was being watched, recorded and later scrutinized, as it had been for quite some time.

Mother had insisted that he get some food in his churning stomach before he left and, bless her cotton socks, she had put on her pinny and busied herself in the kitchen to make him a bulging bacon and egg sandwich. He probably looked as bad as he felt, and she was no fool.

Looking up from the sports page of his daily snoozepaper, his father had quickly taken in and summed up the situation with a stereotypically grumpy “You look like warmed up bowel movements,” by way of greeting when Rocky had finally clambered out of the pit and made his way downstairs. Well, his words were a little more choice than that, but you get the picture.

“They're playing your song on the radio, I see ...” Rather too appropriate and timely for comfort, it was a twelve bar blues number about some drunken low-life ending up flat out on the tiles again. That kind of thing happened a lot in Rocky's life. He'd read somewhere, in one of the underground student magazines that it was called synchronicity.

Or wishful thinking, a wise voice inside his head corrected him, both denying and confirming his beliefs at one and the same time. That also happened a lot in his life.

“And a very good morning to you, too, Dad,” he'd lilted in return.

“Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit,” his father had retorted. And he, of all people, should know that.

Quotes from Thank You, I Understand by Etienne de L'Amour

“You know, we worry about the Bomb, yet there are millions of people out there with their thumb on the self-destruct button.”

“He had been diagnosed as suffering from atypical schizophrenia. Lord, how he hated that awful-sounding label. It conjured up visions of some deranged maniac escaped from a secure mental hospital.”

“It suddenly hit Rocky what an utter shambles his life had become. Well, not become so much as been since he could first remember. He was a walking disaster area. Some people couldn't put a foot wrong and here he was with two left feet, pointing in opposite directions. One wave short of a bloody shipwreck.”

“God, how he loved that synchronicity, ever-patiently and non-judgementally restoring his wavering faith in destiny and the divine. And straight after that came another soulful favourite of his: Van Morrison singing Warm Love. That was Donna's favourite track of all time. He couldn't listen to that song now without making the connection and tears welling up in his eyes.”

If these quotes have whetted your appetite, you may enjoy Thank You, I Understand, a cautionary tale of sex, drugs, psychosis, love and redemption, by Etienne de L'Amour.

• By Etienne de L'Amour ~ Google+

Tips for writers #5: Getting citations

Getting noticed as an author

Like many authors, you may collect snippets from reviews in the media which heap praise on your books, and then post these on your web site. A typical snippet might read "... absolutely brilliant!" ~ The Times.

Give full publication details

This is fine for your own purposes and to woo your own readership, but if you would like to later have these reviews and interviews cited and used in a Wikipedia article about you or your book, then it would be beneficial to provide more information, including the name of the author, the publication, the article or column title, the date, the page range and, if the material is on-line, the web address. Avoid simply giving a web address, as on-line resources may well be moved or taken down at a later date, leaving a broken link, a process known as "link rot". This will make it far easier for editors and readers at Wikipedia to locate and verify the source and for editors to decide for themselves how to represent the review or interview in the Wikipedia article.

Thank You, I Understand: Etienne de L'Amour

Etienne de L'Amour has just released a new, standalone novel, Thank You, I Understand.

This factional work takes the reader on an evolutionary journey of self-rediscovery from near Neanderthal to sentient human being in a thousand and one fraught lessons.

A psychological drama, it explores the murky depths of the unregenerate psyche, trials and redemption; passionate romance; the wise voice of inner-tuition, and the heightened awareness of eventual spiritual reawakening. An awakening into a strange world pregnant with deep meaning in which we see revealed an awe-inspiring hidden design at work amidst the everyday life which we mistakenly take to be the real world.

Rocky Rhodes is one wave short of a shipwreck as the story begins, going through a period of teenage rebellion, amidst a subculture of sex, drugs and rock and roll, and later he experiences psychosis and schizophrenia. But his life begins to take on new direction when he is introduced to the way of the Sufi mystics.

Thank You, I Understand is a standalone novel of around 80,000 words.

The book is available for the Kindle at Amazon US, Amazon UK and other Amazon web sites: ASIN: B009KCNLHS. It is free of DRM (digital rights management) to make it easier to read and share.

You can also find the book at Goodreads.

A free preview (in Kindle/.mobi or .epub format) is available 24/7 from our Dropbox site. The preview is also available in pdf format at our mirror web site (on-line 10:00 to 22:30 hours, UK time, most days).

• By Etienne de L'Amour ~ Google+

Is this the end for peer review at Amazon?

I see that the Amazon UK reviews for J.K. Rowling's The Casual Vacancy have already been utterly hijacked, within hours of publication. Most of the 1-star reviews are complaining about pricing, making no attempt to actually review the contents, and the book is also being tagged with terms like "kindle swindle".

Across at the Amazon page for John Locke's How I Sold 1 Million eBooks in 5 Months!, one of the critical 1-star reviews entitled The Secret He Left Out, about how he paid for 300 fake reviews, has been ticked as helpful by no fewer than 531 of 563 people, after the review was repeatedly tweeted and retweeted at the social networking site, Twitter.

Robert Downey Jr. on celebrity quotes

A quote by Robert Downey Jr. on the cult of celebrity.

• By Etienne de L'Amour ~ Google+

Authors tempted to fake reviews and pimp their bios

There's been quite a hoo-hah recently about authors faking reviews at Amazon and on-line forums. Little has been said as yet, at least publicly, but I predict that the talk will sooner or later turn to the same kind of fakery and pimping going on at the on-line encyclopedia, Wikipedia.

In an article entitled The Best Book Reviews Money Can Buy in the New York Times, the author John Locke admitted that he'd bought 300 fake reviews, even getting the reviewers to purchase the books directly from Amazon so that their reviews would show up as verified purchases. Elsewhere, it's noted that such reviewers received only half of their fee from the agency involved if they felt that they could not deliver a five star review. Ironically, this unethical and debatably fraudulent big secret is something that John Locke left out of his book How I Sold 1 Million eBooks in 5 Months!

The Telegraph and other newspapers also ran the story of author R.J. Ellory who was caught out using sock puppets (pseudonymous on-line personas) to create fake reviews lauding his own work and criticizing rivals. Some commentators suggest that this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Timbuctoo by Tahir Shah: Book review

☆☆☆☆☆ If you like a story about the oppressed, the downtrodden or the outsider coming through in spite of harrowing events, grave injustices and enormous odds stacked against them; characters you love to hate; and a good old-fashioned love story, then you may well find wonderful resonances and enjoyment in Tahir Shah's epic novel, Timbuctoo. There are some anti-establishment sentiments in the mix and, given some of the characters' proclivities and activities -- such as the Prince Regent's whimsical excesses and the making of fortunes from trade in unfortunate African slaves -- rightly so, I feel. These themes are timeless.

There's a wise, old saying that you only possess that which would survive a shipwreck. In Robert Adams' case, this was faith, hope, gritty determination and above all the passionate love which fuelled and drove these qualities in him, and to which he clung on for dear life. We're all shipwrecked when we're brought into this world, become enslaved in one way or another and, separated from our "beloved", we yearn to be reunited. There's something about this process that touches on the mystical. In a sense, then, like the old woodcutter in the traditional story of Mushkil Gusha (Remover of All Difficulties), Robert Adams is telling us our own archetypal story and also showing us a way through all this to freedom. The details are very different for each individual, but the underlying pattern is the same.

Fragmentation of attention in the internet age

In general terms, I’m tempted to think that in this second phase of the internet age, we’re now being overwhelmed with both choice and volume in information.

When I first ran a web site around 1999, many folk would browse the whole of the web site at a leisurely pace and even download all of the free pdf documents before moving on. More recently, I’ve seen that most visit for a specific purpose and often leave having read or flipped through one or two pages, sometimes within just a few mere seconds.

Over time I’ve also seen the old usenet newsgroups die a death, then yahoo! forums, with lengthy discussion threads giving way to one-liners or simple “likes” and more and more fragmentation of venues, of information, and of the participators' or audience's attention. Having said that, certain niche communities, such as pagans and conspiracy theorists, continue to buck such trends.

The indie author's quest for reviews

As an indie author, I've just spent the best part of a week googling and listening in on twitter streams like “science fiction”, in search of possible reviewers. I've managed to locate four lovely bloggers who are first of all willing to review indie authors and who, furthermore, are willing to read soft science fiction.

The gatekeepers and the slush pile 

What I've found time and time again, however, is that a great many reviewers (most of whom are themselves self-published) will not look at the work of the indie author or the self-published. One such reviewer, Gav Reads, has written a blog post entitled “Thoughts – Reasons Why We Reviewers Won’t Read Your Self-Published Book” which will give you a taste of what indie authors are up against, not only when looking for mainstream reviewers but also book review bloggers, and what reviewers are themselves up against.

 

With paragraph headings like “We [reviewers] know it’s going to be rubbish”, as you can imagine, this led to a lively debate and raised a few hackles – not least my own. I think that the mistake I made was to be mildly offended by the double standards operating between Gav's use of the term “We Reviewers”, which includes the self-published and suggests a superior class of sentient being, and the notion of “Real Writers”, which excludes self-published proles like me.

Quotes from The Dissidents by H.M. Forester

“When it came to dealing with feral dissidents, there was only one unwritten law that superseded all others: "An' it secure a conviction, do what thou wilt.”

“The worst of all was to be faced with the interrogation technique of Thirty Seconds. The interrogator would say something and you had to respond quickly, without once repeating yourself or using the personal pronoun. Very few dissidents could last the full thirty seconds, and a refusal to comply was taken as equal proof of dissidence.”

“I? This is the very root of all evil, Potter,” the Special Investigator shuddered, reaching for her spray, as if to rid herself of some malodorous aftertaste. “How we detest that vile word. It makes us feel quite nauseous.”