Mick Canning's Blog, page 52

Interview with Mick Canning

My first author interview, with Cathleen Townsend. My thanks to her for generously hosting this.

The Beauty of Words

I met Mick through his wonderful blog, located at https://mickcanning.co/, and I was delighted when he agreed to be a guest here today.

Let’s start with you, Mick. Tell us about yourself.

I’ve always been writing, and completed 2 novels a long time ago. Both were so awful, though, that I junked them. It was a good learning curve, however, and now I’m hopefully a more mature writer. Until I become rich and famous (!), though, I make ends meet by teaching rock climbing, and occasionally some other outdoor activities.

I love travelling, especially to India and other nearby countries, which probably comes out in my blog posts!

I’ve learned a lot about India from those posts. How did you start your blog? Has it changed over time?

I have been following the blog at Writer’s Village (http://www.writers-village.org/writing-award-blog.php) for some time, and advice that I received in…

View original post 1,039 more words

Sri Lanka – The Hill Country

I thought I’d bring you a third helping of Sri Lanka today, so to speak. These are a few of the photographs that we took when we went up into the hill country for a few days.

First up, a view of Ella Rock taken across the tea gardens.

Next, a view of the charming Lizzie Villa, our home for a few days. It is set in beautiful gardens, and run by our equally charming hostess, Mrs Lizzie. For the first day or so, we had good weather – rather humid and a little cloudy, but pleasant enough. But then the heavy rain arrived, and our walk from the road to the villa became an adventure in trying to avoid the leeches that magically appeared from every leaf and twig.

During one of the breaks in the weather, we walked to Little Adam’s Peak which is approximately an hour and a half’s walk from Ella to the top. On the way back, we stopped in this lovely flower-covered cafe for some late refreshments.

Tamil tea pickers in a tea garden near Nuwara Eliya. Most tea pickers in Sri lanka are still Tamils, descendants of those brought from India by the British over a hundred years ago to work in the tea gardens.

A farmstead in the jungle near Haputale.

Hillside jungle near Ella.

Finally, the rather quaint railway station at Ella, which was unfortunately closed due to landslips on the line when we wanted to get the train back down to Kandy. We had left the cottage early, and a taxi had dropped us off here. But when it was apparent that the line was closed, the taxi driver very kindly loaded us back into his taxi, drove us to a bus stop and explained which bus we should get, where we should go, and what bus to take from there to Kandy. And would he let us pay him? No, he wouldn’t. Small, unexpected, kindnesses again.

Hello, again!

Well, that was particularly annoying.

My computer suddenly took sick and had to be sent away to the Poorly Computer Hospital, where it underwent a major transplant.

It seemed to be particularly bad timing, considering that I needed to set up the Print On Demand detail for my book, and that I don’t have immediate access to an alternate machine, other than a notebook. Unfortunately, though, the notebook:

a) is very slow,

b) doesn’t have any of my files on it and

c) has a screen too small for me to read without getting a major headache within 5 minutes.

Because of that, I got cross about it and fretted. But after a couple of days I realised that instead of fretting, since I had found out that fretting didn’t seem to help much, I could just have a bit of free time.

And so I read and went for walks and did all sorts of other things, but today I was able to go and collect it from the Poorly Computer Hospital and bring it home again.

The surgery had also involved having several important programs removed, but when I came to reinstall them I discovered that Microsoft had decided to no longer support the Office 2010 program I had bought from them, and so I ended up having to purchase a new version.

Thanks, Microsoft.

On the plus side, though, it had also removed Windows 10, and reinstalled Windows 7. And this is A Good Thing, since it appears that Windows 10 is good for very little other than causing computers to run at a temperature almost high enough to melt rock and to switch themselves off at random times, preferably when that will cause the maximum amount of inconvenience to the user.

Anyway, I’m definitely overdue another post, as it’s a week since my last one. So, what have I missed in all that time, that I might have been blogging about?

The main news in UK seems to be the upcoming referendum on membership of the EU. The Leave Camp have warned that remaining inside the EU will mean that the UK will be plunged into disaster the very next day, with at least 5 million flesh-eating zombies poised to swarm through the Channel Tunnel and invade the country, whilst the Remain Camp warn that a vote to leave will lead to every single family being evicted from their suddenly value-less houses and every business going bust since there will no longer be any market for them to sell their goods to.

Hmm.

What else?

England trounced Sri Lanka in the first test! *dances little jig* That’s important, anyway!

I don’t think anything else has happened.

So, what do I need to do?

Well, firstly apologise to everyone I’ve not had a chance to reply to yet. I’ll do so very shortly!

Secondly, sort out that Print On demand book. I’m on it!

And thirdly, think of a blog post.

Heaven only knows what I can write about this week.

The Morning After…

Wow, what a weekend!

After the book launch, the parties!

Celebrations!

Oh, and when I looked out of the window to see the streams of bunting all the way along the road, and the swarms of well-wishers gathering outside the house, I was so excited!

Then once I had gone out and signed loads and loads of autographs, I was being chased all over town for interviews by all the big newspapers!

And then I…

Well, okay. That’s not strictly true.

It’s not very true at all.

In fact, it’s not true in even the teeniest tiniest littlest way.

My life does not seem to have altered in the slightest and, actually, I’m glad about that.

Right, now it’s time to get on with the next stage.

I’ve put a link on the image of the book on my sidebar, which goes directly to my book page on Amazon (thanks, Stuart!).

And I’m looking at the best way to create Print on Demand paperback copies of the book, probably by using CreateSpace (lots of recommendations), and hope to have that sorted out in a couple of days. I don’t think it’s too difficult, but my way of dealing with new technology tends to be by shouting at it and slamming doors, so I may take longer than other writers.

But since the release date of the Kindle copy is June 4th, I should have time to arrange for the paperback to be released on the same date.

So, what next?

Actually, it will be great to feel that I can focus on just writing again, and not just constant editing and revision, so it’s back to the long Work in Progress, ‘The Assassin’s Garden’. This has a timeline that stretches from Medieval Persia through Medieval India and the British Raj, through to Edwardian England. It’s already a long novel and nowhere near finished, so I suspect that I might eventually have a trilogy on my hands.

I might even write a short story or two.

Ooh, it’s exciting. I do love this writing lark!

Published!

Well, blimey, Making Friends with the Crocodile is now published on Kindle and is up on Amazon as we speak!

About a week ago, I reached the point where I felt that the editing was finally complete, or, at least, if it wasn’t, then I might just pick at it for ages without really making any further difference, and so it was time to get the process finished.

What a relief.

It feels as though I have been under pressure for weeks. I’ve felt tired, I’ve felt tense.

Ooh, I’ve been irritable!

All this pressure, of course, is of my own making. A lot of it, I suspect, being due to this being my first foray into publishing.

I knew that I needed to format my text for Kindle, and heard that Scrivener was a useful tool for that. And so I downloaded Scrivener, and spent a couple of hours working through the tutorial until I decided that it just wasn’t going to happen for me.

I’m sure it is very useful, but I was getting to the point where I felt like chucking the laptop at the wall.

So I went and looked in detail at the instructions for publishing on Kindle, and found that you could just save your file in the correct format and then upload that.

Bye, bye Scrivener.

I looked at a few Kindle books and then wrote the stuff at the front and back of the book – about copyrights and stuff like that.

I inserted my table of contents.

I already had my book cover ready.

I wrote the blurb:

‘Siddiqa was only just into her teens when she was forced to leave her home to live with her new husband and his family in another village. The years have passed, and now Siddiqa has three children of her own. Her grown up son has brought his new wife, Naira, to live with them, so Siddiqa is no longer the lowliest in the household, for she has a daughter-in-law.

Life in rural India is particularly harsh for women. This novel explores themes of female oppression and tradition and asks whether the next generation will find life any easier.’

Working out how to upload to Kindle, and to complete all of the forms and tick boxes proved a little long winded, but reasonably straightforward.

So then, suddenly, there it was. Sitting on Amazon, available for pre-order, with a launch date of 4th June. Although for some reason, unfortunately, pre-order is not available in India.

And now it feels much like stepping off of a crowded and noisy street into summer sunshine; the sounds of the shouting and the traffic disappearing and being replaced by birdsong.

Woo-hoo!

And what a buzz to go and look at my own author page on Amazon, with my own book there!

Woo-hoo again!

For the moment, as I say, it is only available for pre-order, and will be released on 4th June. But if anyone does feel inclined to buy it, pre-orders will help boost the ratings when it actually launches.

I am going to look again at Print on Demand, in a day or so. Initially, I had ruled it out, mainly because the one site that I looked at required the customer (i.e. me) to order and pay for a set number in advance, and I assumed that would always be the case, but now I think that is possibly not so. Certainly, the Amazon tool, CreateSpace, looks as though it might work more the way that Kindle does.

It will be great if it does, since I really prefer to have a physical copy of a book, and I know there are still a few other people out there who still feel that way.

So…now to get my head around promotion…

Sri Lanka (2)

Sra Lanka – Ancient Cities

Today, a return to Sri Lanka, and a few of the photographs that I took at some of the ancient sites.

Dambula – Rock Temple – reclining Buddha. There are 5 caves in all, each one more splendid than the last (assuming, of course, that you visit them in the correct order!), containing some 150 Buddha images.

Dambula – Rock Temple -feet of reclining Buddha statue.

BELOW: A further selection of images from the caves at Dambulla.

Anuradhapura – Red brick Jetavanarama Dagoba.

Anuradhapura – moonstone. Moonstones were not merely designed to be decorative, the patterns and figures are all relevant to Buddhist cosmic symbology.

Anuradhapura. The Ruvanvelisaya Dagoba.

Anuradhapura. Elephant carvings at the Ruvanvelisaya Dagoba.

Buffaloes at Anuradhapura doing what they do best!

Plastic Bottles of Water

Plastic bottles of water.

We buy plastic bottles of water.

Why the bloody hell, at least in the west, do we buy plastic bottles of water?

And, hang on a minute, before we even start wondering why we pay stupid amounts of money for a commodity that is virtually free, we even pay for those silly little contraptions on the tops of the bottles that you grip with your teeth, pull, and then, if it works, and doesn’t just break off, enables you to squirt the water through this nozzle into your mouth.

All of this just to save you unscrewing the cap and taking it off.

The dreadful labour of having to unscrew the cap.

And taking it off.

Perhaps that is why we buy the bottled water – to save us the bother of turning a tap and holding a glass beneath it to catch the water.

Really?

So why do we do it?

It costs…well, tap water is all but free. For example, in California tap water costs one tenth of a cent per gallon.

In the UK my local water company charges £1.248 per cubic meter, which is 220 gallons, for water. This makes it just over half a penny a gallon.

Bottled water? On sale in my local supermarket for £1.50 for 3 litres. On special offer. There are approximately 4.5 litres in a gallon, so this costs out at £2.75 per gallon, which is approximately 550 times more expensive than tap water. Or, if you like, you are paying under half a penny for the water, and almost the entire £2.75 for the plastic bottles.

Feel good about that?

Me neither.

Perhaps the bottled water is far superior to the tap water?

Nope. Sorry about that, it’s not.

First of all, approximately half of it comes from the tap in any case. Yup, that’s right. The company that flogs it to you gets it from out of the tap.

And as for the rest, tap water is subject to more stringent quality and health standards than bottled water is, in any case. In tests on water in the USA last year, tap water came out better.

So are the huge, multinational soft drinks companies who manufacture these things doing it for our benefit?

You bet they’re not. They’re doing it because they can see an easy and gigantic profit.

We could do worse than talk to our old friend, Mr Satan Moneyglutton, the anonymous CEO of a major soft drinks company, at this point.

‘I honestly don’t know what you’re whingeing about. You want convenience, don’t you? What could be more convenient than pouring all of your money into our coffers?

‘Tap water is so yesterday. It’s inconvenient. We have declared war on tap water. When we’re done, tap water will be relegated to irrigation and washing dishes.

‘And we are working hard to persuade restaurants not to give tap water to diners, but force them instead to purchase our bottled drinks.

‘It is helpful, of course, that most towns and cities seem to have stopped building and maintaining public water fountains, thereby forcing the thirsty citizen to purchase a canned or bottled drink.

‘Furthermore, with the spread of those nasty windfarms and tidal power generators, the future for oil as a source of power is, sadly, looking a wee bit unhealthy.

‘Clearly, there’s no point in leaving the oil in the ground where it’s of no use to anyone, so it makes sense to step up the manufacture of plastics which, incidentally, will make me even richer.’

So, there you go.

‘Nice bottle of water, sir? Only £1. And would you like a plastic bag full of air with that? Only £1.50.’

Don’t laugh – it’ll happen soon, I’m certain.

My First Long Trip to India (7) – the Final Installment!

It was much warmer down in Kalimpong. Indeed, I would be inclined to describe it as hot, although I have no doubt that most Indians would say ‘Pah! You think that’s hot?’ Possibly I wouldn’t think so either, if I had just come up from the plains, but coming from Sikkim, it definitely felt hot.

The first morning, as soon as I had finished breakfast, I took a long, hot, but extremely beautiful walk up hill through mixed forest to the Durpin Gompa, or, as it’s properly called, the Zang Dog Palri Fo Brang Monastery. It was a morning of flowers, trees, sunshine and butterflies, and for some reason I felt especially euphoric.

 

The road to the monastery runs through an army checkpoint and lots of army land, and from the checkpoint I was helpfully taken partway by an extremely polite and friendly redcap and shown the correct junction. As I continued my walk, I was passed by a number of soldiers who all smiled and wished me a good morning. It was slightly unnerving, since most soldiers I had come across before had tended to adopt their special stern and unfriendly faces for me as soon as I neared them.

Later, on the way back from the monastery, I was stopped at the same checkpoint by a soldier who decided that he wanted to chat. So for some ten minutes or so, I was standing there, with him holding my hand and asking me where I came from and about my family and what I thought of India and yet, after two months in India, it all seemed entirely natural.

What else did I do in Kalimpong? Well, I virtually overdosed on lassis, especially mango lassis. The fancy just took me.

I had a haircut.

I got some of my films developed. There was no real reason why I should, but I felt impatient and for some reason wanted to look at the ones I had taken of Bodhgaya.

I watched the last of the India / Pakistan cricket series on the TV. India won the test series as well as the ODI’s. It seemed that the whole series had been played in a fantastic spirit, and I found myself hoping that this might, in some small way, lead to improved relations between the two countries.

But I feared that I was being hopelessly naïve.

I looked around the market, which was fun – as it usually is in India. And I took a number of photos. And here I must admit to a strong loathing of the tourists and travellers that shove a camera lens in someone’s face and take a picture, totally oblivious of any offence they may cause. You see it so often. And I think it is so often a kind of western arrogance, an idea that they somehow have a right to do it.

Once, waiting for a flight at Dubai airport, I witnessed two young Japanese tourists who approached an Arab gentleman who was looking splendid in white dishdash and keffiyeh, sitting and drinking coffee. After poking the camera lens into his face and taking a couple of photos, whilst the gentleman sat impassively ignoring this rudeness, the girl had the effrontery to pull a chair right up next to him and lean into him, as the boy continued taking photos.

I cringed. I felt the entire room cringe.

The gentleman concerned drained his cup and slowly stood up, bowed without smiling to the young couple, and walked off.

So I walked around the market stalls, asking people if I could take their photos. Some said no, but most said yes.

 

Late afternoon, and thick cloud was quite literally sitting on the top of Kalimpong. The ground level was warm and dry, whilst the tops of the buildings and trees disappeared into the clouds. I remember seeing this also in Kathmandu, once. It’s a kind of inversion, but I think there’s a special name for it when it occurs in urban areas.

I returned to the plains by share jeep again, and flew back to Delhi the following day.

Delhi felt very different to how it had felt a couple of months before – much hotter, now, and the lighter evenings gave it a very different feel, too. Other than buy books and walk around a lot, I didn’t do a great deal with my two days there.

In my mind, I had already left to go home.

 

 

My First Long Trip to India (6)

There seemed to be so much rain falling in Sikkim that I began to wonder whether they had their own private monsoon.

It sounded as though it was raining all night, although ‘raining’ does not really do it justice as a weather phenomenon; that would rather be like suggesting that Lapland has a little bit of snow in the winter, or that it could sometimes be quite sunny in the Kalahari Desert.

It was hammering down.

It started whilst I was out in the evening, and it only stopped around dawn. When I went out to find some breakfast, thick, black clouds were still filling the sky, and it was much cooler than it had been the previous evening. Small rivers seemed to be hurtling along the sides of all the roads, and random lakes occupied much of the lower areas.

At first sight, I was really disappointed in Gangtok. It appeared very modern, with lots of new buildings and virtually nothing that appeared to be old. It was very clean (possibly due to it being extremely well-washed) and tidy. There seemed to be really very little for the visitor to see.

I decided to arrange to go on a trek as soon as I could.

Just to make it a little more difficult, though, all treks had to be arranged through officially approved agents, and there was technically a requirement for a minimum of four people per trek, although it was possible to do it with less.

And it wasn’t cheap.

Eventually, I ended up with a three day trip to the Yumthang valley – as far north in Sikkim as you are allowed to go – leaving the following morning. There were three of us: myself and a pleasant Swiss couple. After a lot of form-filling and passport photocopying, I handed over my money, and walked outside into the torrential rain.

The next day at dawn there was a blue sky, or at least as much of it as I could see from my window. A rain-washed blue, I’d be tempted to say. I packed, and then went off to the hotel where I was to meet the others. There I had breakfast, stored a bag for my return, and sat around reading and waiting to go.

We set off just after ten o’clock in a jeep, and I was excited to be travelling again among the high mountains with Nepalese style villages. We stopped for lunch at an inn, which again was very clean and modern. And so far, the weather had been good. We had a good view of Kanchenjunga when we left Gangtok, and by lunchtime there were just a few clouds over the mountain tops. By one fifteen we had reached Mangan, the capital of north Sikkim, and another police check post, to show our passes. Only, this time the check post was empty – apparently, the fellow was at lunch, so we had to kick our heels for twenty minutes.

I was making quick notes as we drove along, which seem to give a good snapshot of the area. And so:

Gangs of women breaking stones to mend the road.

Suspension bridges.

Huge clumps of huge bamboo.

Bell flower bushes.

Masses of butterflies.

Gompas.

Landslides.

Rivers rushing across roads.

Good and bad bits of road.

Bottlebrush trees.

Orchids!

Buddhist symbols painted inside and outside buildings.

Long, long lines of prayer flags beside the road.

We reached Lachang, at 4pm, at an altitude of 8500ft or so. The hotel we were booked into was very smart and new, constructed and decorated entirely in Tibetan style. They gave us a supper of Tibetan vegetable soup, cheese momos and fruit, and then I went off for an early night.

I awoke to blue skies and snow covered mountain peaks, and at seven o’clock the sun was streaming around some awesome jagged peaks towering over the village.

Seven thirty and we were on our way by jeep again. The last twenty one kilometres was through an area that is designated a ‘prohibited area’ – no one is allowed in without a permit, and cameras are strictly prohibited. Naturally, when we got to the valley there were plenty of people snapping away, despite the presence of numerous soldiers. When I saw soldiers actually posing for photographs, I decided it was probably safe to get my own camera out.

More notes:

Glaciers.

There are thirty one species of rhododendron in Sikkim.

Landslips.

Tibet just a few miles away.

The valley is at an altitude of 11500ft.

There was a cold wind blowing up the valley from the south. Yumthang is 140km from Gangtok by road. I wonder what it is as the crow flies?

Butterflies – clouded yellow, painted lady, tortoiseshell – they all seemed to be ones that I knew from UK.

We walked 8km back and then the jeep picked us up. It was beautiful.

Hot springs just below Yumthang – a malodorous, sulphurous pool in a stone shed!

Clouds were dropping down as we headed back to Lachang for lunch.

There were a number of tall mountains to the south of the valley, and I asked our guide their names. They have no names, he replied. They are all less than 6000m, so they don’t bother naming them in Sikkim (although I’m sure that traditionally they must have had names – all the mountains seen from a town or village would have had names, even if just local ones).

I think it was at this point that I decided I would have to visit Ladakh.

In the afternoon we drove up the other side of the valley to visit Lachang Gompa. It was not a ‘working’ monastery, since the monks live down in the village. Therefore it was locked, as it is only used on full moon days and festivals. But we could at least go around the outside, to see the huge prayer wheels (and spin them) and see the beautiful frescoes.

 

 

The following morning we left at 6.30 on a fine, clear morning. The idea behind leaving so early was to go to a viewpoint high above a valley, but by the time that we got there it was the usual mass of clouds drifting above and below us. Some rain at times. Sunny periods. Outlook changeable.

And so back to Gangtok.

That night it poured with rain again, and the following morning, as usual, there was thick, low clouds filling the skies and the valleys. This was followed by another heavy overnight rainstorm.

Time to move on.

I had breakfast, checked out, and went straight to the jeep park. Just after midday, I was in Kalimpong. On the way, the sky soon cleared, and it was hot sunshine long before we reached West Bengal.