More on The Qliphoth

The Death Ray review has now appeared, featuring some encouraging comments e.g "From intense narration to first-person hallucination, it's a book that draws you in and leaves you gasping for air..... It's wonderfully, maddeningly inventive stuff..." The Hereford Times piece has also appeared, under the heading AUTHORS QUEST ENDS IN CANADA, giving the impression that, having been rejected by the entire UK publishing establishment, I travelled the world in search of publication. There are the usual compressions and inaccuracies, like the omission of my publisher's name, much to his exasperation. Still, there's no such thing as bad publicity.

First review for the Qliphoth!

A very positive review of the book is appearing shortly in Death Ray, the new UK sci-fi magazine

THE QLIPHOTH emerges

The pricing problem with Amazon UK is now resolved and the correct RRP is displayed. I haven't seen the Bookseller article yet but the local paper - Hereford Times - has promised to do a piece. More review copies are going out into the void...

With the big corporates offering payola to Waterstones and massive campaigns for their product in the press, it's hard to compete. But we plug on...

The QLIPHOTH arrives in the UK, almost...

The Qliphoth is now available in the UK. You can actually go into Waterstones and order it. The Hereford branch has been persuaded to stock a copy on the shelves and hopefully other local branches will follow suit after I have paid them a visit. Treadwells , London's wonderful esoteric bookshop, will also be stocking it. Review copies have gone out to the broadsheets and a couple of sf/fantasy magazines e.g Interzone. We also have more web listings or mentions e.g Sci Fan, The Blues Band, Curtain Rising and apparently forthcoming mentions in The Bookseller and on the Canadian High Commission site in their cultural newsletter. There's a nice blog review, too from the mysterious Cicerone. We're also listed on US and UK Amazon, although the UK site still has to list the correct RRP of £10.99 - currently they're listing the bizarre price of £31 set by some specialist import service.

The Qliphoth arrives in the same week as the terminal tome featuring Harry Potter. As my book features a young disaffected man going on a strange journey and learning arcane secrets in a curious academy, people may presume I've tried to exploit the Potter phenomenon. However, documentary evidence will show that I finished the first huge draft as long ago as 1990, long before Ms Rowling produced her first work. Perhaps she tapped my brain-waves - although I think not. This is an archetypal narrative structure.

THE QLIPHOTH - PLANNING A UK LAUNCH

Setting up UK distribution for the monsterpiece will be quite a complex task, involving registering with Nielsens Book Data, checking out the wholesaling options with Gardners, setting up accounts and effectively becoming my own marketing & PR service. "Every man his own football, " said one of the old Dadaist poets - Tristan Tzara, I think - and this is particularly true in the digital era, when you have to keep kicking your own ass in order to move forward in a series of tiny jerks.

Canadian & US sales so far have been modest - not surprising, seeing that we haven't had any reviews yet, and at this point the book is only available via the Libros Libertad website or Amazon, and PR has only been via press releases or postings on bulletin boards. However, Canadian bookshop distribution is apparently in the pipeline.

Once UK distribution is set up, we can launch. I have some stratagems. The Qliphoth is imminent - and, of course, immanent. Which is the premise of the book. It's a black book.

THE QLIPHOTH EMERGES IN CANADA

My novel The Qliphoth is now available on the Libros Libertad website. I haven't actually seen the finished book yet, only a pdf of the proofs, so it's a strangely disconnected experience. But that's typical of weblife. Meanwhile emails go out into the void and the virtual book, this spectral craft of signage, with its greenish glyph of a cover, floats off into cyberspace. It's a liberation, to let go of it. Although there's always the hope that that someone will catch it, it will causes flickers of brain activity somewhere, morphing again and again as it's reconstructed into a shivery new entity. Time to move on.

CONCLUSIONS/BEGINNINGS

That's the end ( or beginning) of the sequence I began and abandoned in October, The litter of my letters. There's more, more spiral-bound in old notebooks. The compost of composition. I shall return, it will keep turning up and around.

Focussing now in writing a piece around Iain Sinclair's London - City of Disappearances for www. culturecourt.com and spreading the word about my novel The Qliphoth, out soon from www.libroslibertad.ca

FOCUS GROUPING

Let's pause, take stock at the centre-point, the fulcrum of my elegant consciousness. But there is no centre, no ghostie toasting snugly in the machine, according to Dennett and the multiple drafts theory of consciousness, where the brain just fuddles along being frantically updated by bits of itself, usually just ahead of any "conscious' decision-making process. The Archives are In a constant state of self-shredding and re-collaging. Sub-programmes write different sub-titles to our shifty sub-texts

VOLUMES

The bland moment: all services, all surfaces are manufactured, the world's made up for me. I'm a faction, mockumenting my discursives and vocatives, my over-voices. A recent night's footage includes a greying green room with a triangulation of dormer, a pinkish bed-cover. The shadows hide crane-flies. I put a few things together with hyphens.

So that was my little lebensraum. But as you age, time contracts, space has tiny contractions. Try to calm down with bits of memoir and my coloured pencils of rhetoric.

TIME SHIFTING

Improvise over a gap year
and you grow a new person

King Tubby in deep biomass
nice creatures surround your sound

Jubbly in our cytoplasm
you and I multiply the vanities

"Consciousness is my only subject"
utters old Mikey, bull-moose of the labyrinth

BRAIN STEMS

Sleeping on the dangerous planet
to discharge the daily toxins
and ghost a new narrative

Into the fuzz, dream janglings
won't shut up or down
in the forsaken lavatories of embarrassment

but the senses are a front
frontal or fractal our humint
is a conjugation of weakling verbs by night

desire flared once
and ended in fuzzy logic
the time-ship is only a time-slip

BULLETINS

The rain bulletins open a wound
it's sticky in the comfort zone

In the desolate aisles I/we runabout foraging
sizzled by brands

All colours bleed and run
in the soaped world

Vodcasts target the dread of dreams
re the decay of breath, bad follicles

The subject sits sideways like an object
distracted by rival cars

Who is the feebled verb
In the amphitheatre of coloured rhetoric

I'd love a cone of light and music
and an opening in the atmosphere