Point of view

 Michael - Alternate Thursdays

An author has some big decisions to make when starting a novel. For example, it can be written in the present tense or in the past tense i.e. the reader can be told what happened or see it happening in “real time”. Both have advantages and disadvantages. Present tense is more immediate. You see what’s happening at this instant so the future remains undetermined. You are in the moment. Past tense is more usual and some readers expect stories to be told that way. Someone telling a story aloud is unlikely to do it in the present tense. The narrator knows the whole story and so tells it in the past tense. It can be easier to develop backstory also.

Then there’s point of view (POV). In writing-speak point of view refers both to the mode of writing the author chooses for the novel, and to the focus on a character whose perspective holds within a particular chapter or section.

An omniscient POV is when the narrator is all knowing. The author can tell us what’s happening inside any character’s head at any time, knows where everything is going. Although it’s hackneyed, the narrator could say, “If only she’d known…” The problem here is that the reader can feel disconnected from the protagonist, and the author must be careful not to flip from the inside of one head to another and then to another, which can be irritating and confusing.

If all the focus is to be on the protagonist, let her tell the story in first person. The reader is in her head all the time. That’s great for her character development. She tells us not only what she thinks but how she thinks. We see all other characters from her perspective, so they are really just reflections in her mind. It’s a wonderful way of making the book entirely about her. There is, of course, one big snag especially for a mystery or a thriller. The reader can only see what she sees and know what she knows. The reader can’t see the bad guy sneak up behind her with a gun. Not until she swings around and faces him.

Then there’s third person POV. Now the story is told in third person. It may be third person close, in which case most of the time it will be from the protagonist’s POV but narrated in third person. However, it may be more relaxed. Chapters may be from different character’s POVs. It allows one to see the bad guys plotting, the protagonist thoughts in action, some straight story narration for background, and so on. I think it’s true that most novels are written in this flexible style of third person. It’s the way we write the Kubu books, and it works particularly well for police procedurals because it allows the reader to see things that Kubu does not to add tension and interest in how Kubu discovers them.

When we started writing our stand-alone thriller Dead of Night, we decided on a challenge. We would have a female protagonist (who eventually ended up as a woman of Vietnamese ancestry to make still harder), we would write it in the present tense for the immediacy, and we would use first person POV. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, quite a lot as it turned out. We struggled with the main character, but that’s another story. We found present tense hard to manage – maybe because we were so used to the past tense model. Once we settled on the plot and the character and felt comfortable with that, we dropped the present tense and reverted to the past tense that made us more comfortable. But we stuck it out with the first person POV. We wanted all the focus on Crystal, and we felt that her perspective throughout helped with tension.

The book took us much longer than we’d expected, and when we sent it to our editor, it was with considerable trepidation.

He was not thrilled. I think he felt that Crystal was still narrating the story rather than living it. We went through multiple iterations, and at times it felt that there were now three of us writing the book instead of two of us. In the end, the editor called for the “nuclear option”. The book would be rewritten in third person close i.e. it would be almost entirely from Crystals POV, but we would be telling the story not her. It called for a total rewrite of the book, but it seemed to work.

I know of many writers who have successfully written from multiple POVs – even within a single series. The first Reacher novel was in first person, and then Child switched to third person. Why was it so hard for us? Stanley has suggested—and I think he’s right—that first person is very, well, personal. You are inside the protagonist’s head all the time. Everything happens inside that head. But we are two heads. Although we think we are both inside the same head, perhaps we have slightly different perspectives and that slightly blurs the character.

If there’s a moral to this story, it’s probably that you should write in the way that feels comfortable to you. Don’t be afraid to change, but don’t assume it’ll be easy!   

 

My first solo

 Stanley - Thursday

If my flying logbook were with me in Minneapolis, and not in my flat in South Africa, I would know the exact date that I first flew solo. That I don’t remember it is not surprising because it is irrelevant. It was probably in December 1968 or January 1969.

On the other hand, there are many things about that flight that are forever etched in my memory. 

The airport was Rand Airport in Johannesburg. The plane was a brown and white Cessna 150 with call sign ZS-EDH. The flight was scheduled in the morning in order to avoid the normal summer-afternoon turbulence. 

ZS-EDH with its original paint job

 

After completing all the necessary preflight checks, my instructor and I took off and I completed several take-offs and landings. When he was satisfied that I wasn't going to kill myself, we taxied to the apron, he climbed out, and I was on my own. I don't remember exactly how many hours I had under my belt at the time, but my hazy recollection is that it was around ten. Only ten!!

 

Even though I had previously done everything required to complete a take-off, a circuit, and a landing, including all the necessary radio communications with the tower, my adrenaline was flowing because I couldn't just throw up my hands and yell 'you've got it!'. For the first time there wouldn't be anyone to rescue me.

'Rand Ground. Cessna ZS-EDH request taxi, remaining in the pattern.' I suspect my voice was at least one octave higher than normal.

It was a good thing that we'd already completed a few circuits that day, because I didn't have to decipher the ground controller's instructions to get to the end of the active runway.

When I reached the end of the taxiway and had checked the various instrument readings, the magnetos, and so on, I switched to tower frequency and requested clearance for a take-off and landing.

In my head, I was running through rotation speed, climb speed, circuit altitude, radio procedures on each leg of the pattern, and, scarily, what to do if the engine quit.

'ZS-EDH cleared for take-off.' There was a pause, then 'Good luck.' It was my instructor who had gone to the tower so he could calm me down if I panicked or remind me of procedures if I suffered a brainfart.

I taxied onto the runway, advanced the throttle, applying some rudder pressure to counter the torque, and headed down the runway, trying to keep right on the centreline, Ahead of me were several of the ubiquitous mine dumps containing the tailings of the crushed ore from the gold mines. 

I lifted the nose and adjusted the pitch angle to settle on climb speed. At one thousand feet above the ground, I made a left ninety-degree turn onto crosswind leg. When an appropriate distance away from the runway, another left ninety-degree turn onto downwind leg. I remember extending the downwind leg further than recommended so that I wouldn't be rushed. Another left ninety-degree turn onto base leg, the another one onto final.

Reduce power, I thought. Now for the tricky part - maintain landing speed while keeping the runway in front, which is sometime easier said than done when there is a crosswind. Then establish a glide path that ends on the runway and not a hundred metres short. It is truly a three-dimensional problem with the added issue of not getting too slow or too fast. If too slow, the plane may fall out of the sky; if too fast, a hoped-for smooth landing may result in multiple bounces on the runway.

Speed, heading, glide-path.

Speed, heading, glide-path.

'Looking good, Stan. Cleared to land.' It was my instructor in the tower.

Just above the runway, I pulled the power off and let the plane settle. No bounces! I had made it. Every sense in my body was in acute mode. I was elated. MY FIRST SOLO!

This week I experienced my second solo, with many of the same emotions, exhilaration, and nervousness.

Why?

Because White Sun Books published my first solo book, titled Wolfman. It is essentially a prequel to the rhino-poaching thriller Michael and I wrote - Shoot the Bastards in North America, Dead of Night elsewhere. 

Crystal Nguyễn, an investigative reporter in Duluth, Minnesota, creates her own news by sabotaging the snowmobiles and other possessions of people poaching gray wolves, then reporting on the incidents. After several of these, she speculates on the news that someone whom she nicknames Wolfman may be responsible. Needless to say, someone latches onto the idea, and starts attacking the poachers themselves. Crystal now has to reverse course and try to persuade whoever the live Wolfman is to back down. Of course, he doesn't.

Most of the other writers on this blog know all too well what it's like to publish a book written only by themselves. It is new for me. I'm excited to see it out there and am experiencing all the uncertainties of that first solo. Will I make a smooth landing, or will I land short or go bouncing down the runway? Only time will tell.

Since Mette can't be with me due to COVID restrictions, I'll just have to finish that bottle of bubbly by myself.

Clink!

Bad news from Botswana

Michael - Thursday

Okavango delta in flood

Botswana is one of our favorite countries, so it’s sad to see all the issues they're grappling with at the moment. The tourist industry is devastated by the measures put in place to try to control the Covid 19 outbreak. Almost all tourism income (and associated jobs) comes from foreign tourists who can afford the upmarket prices. Quick, firm, action seemed to have nipped the virus in the bud, and the country was slowly opening up, when a sudden outbreak of cases last month forced the capital, Gaborone, back into strict lockdown. Botswana's confirmed cases are only in the hundreds with just a handful of deaths and they want to keep it that way, so they're jumping on any outbreak hard. Meanwhile, the economy is battling on almost all fronts.

Sad looking but safe

Unfortunately, rhino poachers don’t worry about laws or Covid. They’ve been driven towards Botswana by the dramatic changes that have taken place in South Africa over the last twelve months. 

Here, the national parks and private game reserves fought with everything they had to stop the poaching and illegal rhino horn trade. Although they managed to at least contain the poaching, it became clear that the anti-poaching teams were winning some battles but would eventually lose the war. It’s a complex issue that we explored through the eyes of investigative journalist Crystal Nguyen in Shoot the Bastards (Dead of Night outside north America) and she came to the conclusion that no wild rhino would be safe as long as it had a horn. That’s become pretty widely accepted now, and the game reserves have embarked on a massive program to dehorn rhinos. It’s expensive and has to be repeated every few years, but it’s working. So the poachers go further afield.

Illustration for Shoot to Kill,
our Kubu story on poaching in Botswana
Included in Detective Kubu Investigates 2
Artwork by Dylan Coleman

Okavango black rhino
Photo courtesy of Save the Rhino

The new target is Botswana’s wilderness gem – the Okavango Delta. The irony is that rare black rhinos were reintroduced there from more vulnerable parts of southern Africa to try to protect them. The area is remote, patrolled by game guides for the tourist camps as well as the national park wardens, and Botswana’s shoot-to-kill policy scared off even the most hardened poachers. At least as long as easier targets were available elsewhere. But now things have changed. South Africa has slender pickings with all the dehorning, and Covid has driven the tourists out of the Okavango and much of the patrolling with them. Also, the area – after a drought year – has been flooded making it impossible to traverse. There have been fifty poaching deaths already. The wildlife authorities are scrambling to find the black rhinos before the poachers do and move them to safety. Who knows where that is?

Then there are the elephants. There has been a sudden die off of elephants in northern Botswana - their major strong hold left in Africa. Four hundred have been found, many collapsed forward as if they were struck down by a sudden mortal blow. But it isn't that. They are not poached - poachers have been known to poison waterholes to subsequently chop off the tusks at leisure, but these have their tusks intact, and there is no sign of dead scavengers which usually indicate such an attack. Anthrax is the fear, but the authorities think not. Then again it may be something else, maybe something new and deadly. I hope they are handling the samples with extreme care.

As though all this wasn't enough, Botswana is engaged in a spat with South Africa that has crashed relations to the lowest level since South African freedom in 1994. The close relationship between President Mokgweetsi Masisi and his predecessor President Ian Khama unraveled almost immediately Masisi took over and started doing things his way. Eventually Khama left the ruling party and led the opposition in a failed attempt to unseat Masisi at the last election.

Bridgett Motsepe protests

Now Masisi has claimed that a coup was planned with billions of dollars of laundered money hidden in two South African banks. His target is Bridgette Motsepe who is supposedly a cosignatory on the accounts. The banks say the accounts don’t exist, and she denies everything. She also happens to be the South African president’s sister-in-law. A meeting between the two presidents has just been cancelled, and the South African government is outraged that the Botswana government has chosen Gerrie Nel (“The Pitbull”) to pursue the lady in question. 

The Pitbull

The Pitbull has a big reputation from his successful prosecution and successful appeal against the initial lenient sentence of Paralympic champion Oscar Pistorius for the murder of Reeva Steenkamp. Since then he's left the public service and now heads up the private prosecutions unit of Afriforum, a right wing group that represents the (mainly white) farmers who claim they're being systematically targeted by black terrorists who aim to drive them from their land – a conspiracy that the SA authorities says doesn't exist. Ominously, the South African minister of State Security has been dispatched to protest to President Masisi. Botswana claims that it did submit a request for official assistance from the SA authorities, but “this request has subsequently conveniently vanished.” 

There may be a book in this…

Meanwhile, Stan and I are keen to get to Botswana for research on the book we’re currently writing. At this rate, by the time the Covid tide recedes, South Africans won’t be welcome there anymore!

Shoot the Bastards now out in North America!

Michael - Thursday 

We're very excited that Shoot the Bastards was released by Poison Pen Press this week. Almost a year after it came out as Dead of Night in the UK, it's now available in North America. We were also delighted to get this great quote on the book from C.J. Box!

'Shoot the Bastards is an extraordinary tale of the extreme measures taken to combat international poaching and smuggling' - C J Box

As with all our books, the official launch will be at Once Upon a Crime in Minneapolis. Stanley will be in conversation with Kent Krueger, author of the wonderful Cork O'Connor mysteries set in the north woods. It should be a super evening.

If you are in the Twin Cities, please join Stanley and Kent:

JUNE 18: 18:30 for 19:00

Once Upon a Crime bookstore

604 W. 26th Street, Minneapolis, MN 55405

We had two main reasons for writing a stand-alone thriller. The major one was the slaughter of rhinos in southern Africa that was taking place as a result of the spiralling poaching pressure, which in turn was motivated by the rocketing price of horn in the streets of Vietnam and China. More and more money was being poured into protecting the rhinos with sophisticated sensing technologies, armed anti-poaching teams, and covert information gathering on the poachers. And despite all the hard work and commitment of the men and women involved, what had developed into a shooting war was being lost. The issues were often trivialised in South Africa with angry calls to "Just shoot the bastards!" Internationally, the issues were even less well understood.

Our second motivation was to stretch ourselves, to get out of our comfort zone with our beloved Detective Kubu, and to invent a new protagonist - someone quite different who could build a gripping story against the backdrop of rhino poaching and horn smuggling.

We immediately decided that we wanted an outsider for the role, someone knowledgeable on environmental issues, but not an expert on the rhino question. We wanted her - we decided on a strong female character for the role - to discover the situation for herself and be naïve about the whole scenario. She would be digging around for information about people who wanted to stay out of sight, so she needed a motivation to do that, and we made her an environmental reporter. We started writing and initially things went along really well. But then we started to hit problems. We knew what we wanted her to do, but we weren't really sure what her motivation was for doing them. Characters fight back when you force them. Their believability fades, and they become two-dimensional. We realised we had a problem. We had to rethink her.

Stanley had the great idea of making her a Minnesotan of Vietnamese descent, someone already somewhat between two worlds, and someone who could speak Vietnamese and had some insight into the culture. So Crystal Nguyen was born, and we made her a reporter for a newspaper in Duluth, Minnesota. Of course, we'd now traded one big issue for another. After all, what could be easier than two South African men writing about a female American who has a Vietnamese background? It took a lot of work, and Stanley wrote what was meant to be a few chapters about Crys's earlier life and ended up as a short novel. Later, we realised that she was motivated by more than her reporter's love of a big break-through story, that in fact she had a very strong personal interest in what had happened to a colleague in South Africa. At that point, she became much more real to us, and the book started to flow well.

However, we had wanted to be out of our comfort zone, and we certainly were! For the first time, we had real push-back from our editors, and they did a great job of helping us improve the book. We liked our first draft, but the final version is streets better. We're very grateful to them. Never underestimate a good editor!

In fact, the US version of the book has some changes from the UK version, and we now feel Shoot the Bastards is the book we wanted to write. Crys grew and developed through the story. What started as a thriller set around the rhino poaching has become Crys's story. We're not sure yet if there will be more Crystal Nguyen novels, but we now know how she would handle new and different challenges.

After six successful Kubu books, we'd become a bit casual about reviews. But this book was so different and had put us under so much pressure that we were biting our finger nails when Dead of Night was released in the UK. We're always delighted by strong reader approval, but the reaction to Dead of Night was very special. We could let our finger nails grow again!

“… an enthralling immersive read that won’t disappoint.”- Lizzie Hays, Promoting Crime Fiction

“This story is brutal, brilliant and utterly breath-taking, my favourite of this writing duo so far … Totally stunning in every sense of the word.” - Books from Dusk Till Dawn blog

“I don’t think I caught my breath properly the whole time I was reading it. It is the best thriller that I have read in a long while.” - A Little Book Problem blog

“Dead of Night may belong with the darkest of Noir writing, but it is also utterly thrilling, multi-layered, skilfully executed, educational, thought-provoking, and ultimately a really satisfying read.” - TripFiction blog

We hope you'll join Crys on her adventure. If you do, you can

WIN A RHINO! Well, not a real one. We're trying to keep those alive and well in Africa. But you can win a beautiful, carved rhino from South Africa. Be one of four people to win a prize. First prize is the rhino, second prize is a secret, and third prizes and fourth prizes are a signed, first-edition hardcover of our first Detective Kubu mystery, A Carrion Death. Email or mail us a copy of your receipt for buying Shoot the Bastards (or hand it to Stanley at the launch) together with your mailing and email addresses. You will go into a draw for a rhino, the secret, and one of these rare books. Entries must be received by midnight, July 31, 2019. Mailing address: Michael Stanley Books, 111 Marquette Ave, Apt 1702, Minneapolis, MN 55401.

Finally, what of Kubu? Well, he's alive and well and still cheating on his diet. We've just had final acceptance of the new book - a prequel to the series titled Facets of Death - from Poison Pen Press and it will be out in the winter.

From the nuclear option to champagne!

Stanley - Thursday

Earlier this week, Orenda Books published our stand-alone thriller DEAD OF NIGHT in the UK! Needless to say, we are delighted, not only because it is always exciting to have a new book see the light of day, but also because it was a long and often difficult path from inception to publication.

For a long time, Michael and I wanted to take a break from our Detective Kubu series, which now stands at six books and counting. We wanted something very different. Young adult? No. Romance? We didn't think so. So we decided on a stand-alone thriller with a protagonist as different from Kubu as possible with a backstory dear to our hearts.

And we wanted to challenge ourselves with respect to the writing.

So, in 2012 we started working on what became DEAD OF NIGHT - featuring a female protagonist with an exotic background, written in the first person - not only first person, but first person present. Aargh!

And for the back story, we decided to use the appalling and frightening arena of rhino poaching and rhino-horn smuggling - something we are both familiar with since 80% of the world's rhinos are in South Africa, and over 1000 of them are slaughtered each year for their horns.

These horns are more valuable than gold in Vietnam - fetching a street price of US$150,000/ kg. A decent size horn is worth nearly half a million dollars. And all it is is keratin - the same material was your fingernails. It has no medical benefits, yet is taken in powdered form as a cure for cancer and other ailments, or snorted like cocaine at the parties of the nouveaux riches. Some use it as an aphrodisiac, where almost certainly it has been laced with a Viagra look-alike. In reality, what is sold at exorbitant prices as powdered rhino horn is probably powdered some-other horn.

The rhino horn trade has everything a thriller writer is looking for: greed, violence, exploitation, conflicting ideas for how to solve the problem, and more greed.

So we started writing.

About 20,000 to 30,000 words later, we ground to a halt. We couldn't figure out where we were going, what should happen next. What was meant to be thrilling was beginning to drag.

For the next three years, we restarted the process several times, switching from first person present to first person past; from first person to third person. All with the same result. We ground to a halt.

Eventually we decided that the problem was that we didn't really understand our exotic female protagonist - Crystal Nguyen, an investigative journalist from Minneapolis, a refugee of the Vietnam war. So I decided to write a short piece about her life in Duluth, MN, where she was working at a local TV station, reporting on environmental affairs.

The short piece expanded, then expanded again, until I had written a 60,000- word novella, which I titled Wolfman. It was written in first person present, which worked well.

Then, with a contract from Orenda Books, we set to write the whole book, again in the first person.

When we submitted the manuscript in mid-March, the pushback was immediate. 'Aaargh,' the editor said. 'Not of your usual quality.'

So we revised it and resubmitted. 'Aaargh,' the editor said again. We revised again. After a couple of more iterations, with the publication date looming and no acceptable manuscript, the editor said we had to embrace the NUCLEAR OPTION - rewrite in the third person. Sound familiar?

In a marathon lasting three weeks, Michael and I rewrote the entire manuscript, changing the focus from Crystal doing a rhino story to Crystal trying to find her potential partner in life and doing a rhino story. The editor nodded. Michael and I collapsed.

And the book was published on time last weekend.

And now we and the book are on a blog tour. Here are some of the reviews so far:

A gripping and devastating novel about an important subject, with a feisty protagonist and more action, twists and thrills than you can handle. It made such an impression n me that I have donated to Save The Rhino in thanks.  (Read the whole review at Live and Deadly blog.)

Dead of Night is more than crime fiction. It’s a breath-taking mix of adrenaline and current affairs brought to life by colourful characters. (Read the whole review at chocolatenwaffles blog.)

And finally, The Writer's Block created two movie trailers for DEAD OF NIGHT. You can watch them here.

So join me in a toast - to DEAD OF NIGHT.  Thank you.

______________________________________________

An update: Thanks so much to those of you who responded to my call for donations to help Books for Africa send a container of 22,000 books to South Africa. So far we've raised about 40% of the target. If you would like to contribute, you can donate here using your credit card. Tax deductible in the USA.

 

The Power of One

Michael - Thursday

NO! Not this one.

Stan and I have just finished what we very much hope are the final edits for our stand-alone thriller Dead of Night. No doubt you’ll be hearing more about the book here in due course, but for the moment I want to talk a little about the writing. This is mainly because my head is still too full of the book to talk coherently about anything else.

With this book we deliberately set out to do something different. We wanted the challenge, and we wanted to see if we could appeal to a wider audience by a change of scene and characters. So we (temporarily) shelved the Kubu series, and took on a new setting, a new protagonist, and a new writing style. Specifically, most of the book is set in South Africa with sections in Switzerland and Vietnam, and the protagonist is a woman, Crystal Nguyen, from Minnesota who was born in Vietnam and came to the US as a refugee with her parents after the Vietnam War. The feature that is common with the Kubu books is that it has a backstory relevant to modern southern Africa—in this case the poaching of rhinos and the smuggling of horns to Asia. And what can or should be done about it.

Yes, this one.

We found a lot of challenges. Could we write a female as the main character? Culturally, Crys is a Minnesotan—she grew up there—and Stan has lived there for most of his career, and I’ve visited often for extended periods. But some of her makeup is Vietnamese. That’s a culture we don’t know at all well. Could we pull that off? Oh, and did I mention that it’s written in first person? I should have mentioned it’s in first person.

From the word go we had two big problems. The one was understanding our new character—what motivated her, what her background was, how she came to be passionate about wildlife and journalism. It was a big enough issue that Stan wrote what started as a novella about her life in Minnesota and ended up as a novel in its own right. That was written in first person present. (Dead of Night is in past tense.) I’m sure you’ll learn more about that book here in the future, too. When we tried to both write her, we found it much harder than writing Kubu. Kubu appears from different perspectives in different scenes; he is consistent, but we don’t view the whole story from inside his head. It’s hard to fit two people into one head at the same time!

We realised right from the start, of course, that everything in the book has to be seen or heard about by Crys, and we realised that put constraints on how the story could be told and its style. You can’t write how anyone else feels or what he or she is thinking. Crys can only deduce that from body language and what they actually say. This was much harder than we expected, or even realised when we finished our first draft. One danger is writing third person in first person i.e. having Crys think about what we would want to narrate. She wouldn't do that. A bigger risk is that the story ends up without the emotional depth that third person narration can provide. The editor had to educate us to that, and we even toyed with rewriting the whole book in third person. (Briefly. Very briefly!)  In the end we added nearly twenty per cent to the book to address those aspects more deeply after a lot of editorial input.

In the end, we are really happy with the result. But, of course, in the final analysis, it is the readers who will decide how successful it actually is.

But I’m not sure we would want to try another first person novel, although we've learned a great deal. And learning is always fun and worthwhile, if somewhat painful on occasion. I’d certainly love to hear what other people think about the first person/third person dichotomy, and if you’ve tried writing both, which do you prefer and why? And which do you prefer reading?

In the meanwhile, back to the relative safety of the younger Kubu finding his feet in his first week in the Botswana CID...

____________________________________________

MICHAEL STANLEY EVENTS

           

We’ll be at CRIMEFEST in two weeks (May 17- 20 in Bristol) moderating panels and appearing on one with Charles and Caroline Todd. We’re greatly looking forward to that one in particular!

THURSDAY, 17 MAY

14:40 – 15.30 Panel: Climate Change: Cold Crimes and Hot Homicides

  Quentin Bates, Kjell Ola Dahl, Lilja Sigurðardóttir, Robert Wilson

  Participating Moderator: Stanley Trollip

FRIDAY, 18 MAY

16:00 – 16:50 Panel: Writing Pairs: Is Two a Crowd?

  Michael Stanley (Michael Sears & Stanley Trollip)

  Charles Todd (Charles & Caroline Todd)

  Moderator: Karen Robinson

SATURDAY, 19 MAY

14:50 – 15:40 Panel: Getting Personal – Private Lives of Characters

  Kjell Ola Dahl, Mari Hannah, Priscilla Masters, Jeffrey Siger

  Participating Moderator: Michael Sears

We are what we drink

Michael-Thursday

Last week, Stanley mentioned that we were in the last throes of writing our stand-alone, Dead of Night. I'm pleased to report that on Tuesday we added the final full stop to the last sentence, and sent it off to our agents and our editor in the UK. Stanley pointed out that the book was already available for advance purchase in the UK on Amazon. Who knew Amazon sold books that hadn’t even been written yet?

If anyone is concerned that we have shelved Kubu in favor of our new protagonist, Crystal Nguyen, don’t worry. Kubu will be back next year. We’ve just accepted a two Kubu book deal with Orenda, and at least the first will feature a younger Kubu trying to find his feet in the CID, working under Assistant Superintendent Jacob Mabaku. And he’ll be back in the US, too—we’ve just signed a deal with Poisoned Pen Press and we are absolutely delighted to be joining them!

All this is by way of introduction to the fact that my mind is now quite blank—emptied of Crystal and not yet reloaded with Kubu. (Some may say that that is its usual state anyway. Thought I’d get in with that one first.) So that is how I sat down to write this blog.

Usually something has happened in the news during the week that intrigues me, but the last week was totally swamped with the news of Cambridge Analytica. I don’t think anyone wants to hear more about that.

There was one thing though. Genetically modifed beer. A research student at UC Berkeley thought of it. Students think a lot about beer anyway (probably second only to that business that takes two of them), so why not? His idea was to splice mint and basil genes into yeast in order to cut out the hops. Hops are expensive, hard to grow, and drink gallons of water. The idea is to replace the bitterness/yeastiness introduced by the hop flowers by adding it directly in the yeast. The London Times took a somewhat tongue in cheek approach with a headline: Abandon all hops.  After insulting the Royal Family or criticizing Football, it’s hard to imagine anything that would get the English more upset than messing around with their beer.

However, in a blind taste test, a panel was convinced—the new yeast made decent beer that matched the hop flavors. Interesting, because the genes spliced were from mint and basil. Sounds more like something you might meet in the southern states than in California. But even the researchers are a bit dubious about the commercial viability of their discovery; brewers are very conservative people apparently.

Most drinks seem to be going the other way—organic wines, handmade craft beers, niche spirits. People have strong feelings about what is best, the right way to do things, and so on. Some of this goes almost to the occult with biodynamic wine making involving buried cows heads and harvesting at full moon.

From my rather limited experience, I can say two things about these types of wines. One, they are usually expensive, and two, they are often very good. The expense clearly comes from all the extra overheads. You start off with insects eating the vines, progress through people having to wake at midnight at full moon (overtime), and end up with the wild yeasts spoiling multiple barrels. The fact that it’s often better may be a result of all these things, but it will be the result of all the extra care and commitment that the vineyard manager and wine maker put into the process.

And organic means different things in different places and different industries. Even quality control regulations vary from place to place. In Burgundy you can chaptalize wine (add sugar). That would be anathema in South Africa (mainly because our problem is too much ripening and so too much sugar). In Burgundy you can’t irrigate vines. (Why would you? Have you been there in winter?) Here it’s completely standard.

All this, of course, interests people at the top end of the market. The vast majority of wine sales go to people who want just three things (1) alcohol, (2) something that isn’t repulsive to drink or produce an instant migraine, and (3) alcohol.

So how about GM beer? In my opinion, all it needs is a catchy name and an appealing label. Suggestions can be sent care of UC Berkeley.

At the end of this stream of subconsciousness, I realize that I still haven’t got anything to write about this week. Well, maybe in a fortnight…

News: bad, good, and unexpected.

Stanley _ Thursday

Two weeks ago, my report came from Ingwelala - my place in the bush - which was experiencing a drought every bit as severe as Cape Town.  There were few animals and some birds.  For the first time in the thirty odd years I've been going there, we didn't even see an elephant.

The only good news at the time was that President Zuma had resigned, which, according to one of the mechanics in the local garage, meant that the rains would come.  He was right!  In both Cape Town and Ingwelala, rain fell.  Not vast quantities, but more like 10 mm.  But rain.  And wet.

I had promised to dance in the rain when it came, but I broke my promise under great pressure from Mette because the prolonged, hacking cough I was experiencing had worsened.

 And then, one night, one of the most frightening things I'd ever experienced happened to me.  I awoke with a coughing fit, but couldn't breathe.  I couldn't inhale through mouth or nose.  I jumped out of bed, coughing, spluttering, wheezing, croaking.  Gasping for breath.  Eventually, I found I could inhale slightly through my nose.  And for the next few minutes, alternated between coughing uncontrollably and slowly inhaling through my nose.

It was frightening.  It was exhausting.

To cut a long story short, Mette and I cut our three-week stay in the bush down to one week, and caught the first flight back to Johannesburg.  From the airport straight to a doctor's appointment, where I learnt I had pneumonia.

Gasp!

Armed with antibiotics, foul-tasting syrup, probiotics, nasal inhalator, and nebuliser, I spent the next week at some friends' home - he a doctor.  The worst part, other than not being able to breathe, was that I couldn't sleep, even when sitting up.  For days, I had a snatch of sleep here, a snatch there.  And I was too scared to take a sleeping pill in case one of my can't-breathe episodes happened and I didn't wake up.  What a way to go!

All this a reason for not having a proper blog today, for which I apologize.  We are back in Cape Town.  I am still coughing, but without the breathlessness of last week,  And I'm optimistic that I am well on the way to being fully healthy.

PS.  There was a very exciting blog in the UK today, which I knew nothing about until a tweet landed on my desk.  You can read it here.