Adrian Meredith's Blog, page 2

Two truths, one lie

Yesterday, as part of an "ice breaker" for a pre-employment training program, I was asked to provide two truths and one lie. It was harmless enough, and so I decided to tell two truths that nobody believes, and one lie that everyone thinks is true:

(1) I was born in Tasmania.
(2) I have five sisters.
(3) I am a published author.

I wasn't sure about putting the "published author" bit in there, as it is so easy to prove. I am a verified Goodreads author, I have an Amazon profile and there are books you can buy with my name on them, and yet that was the first one I was accused of lying about. The rationale was "no authors write about different topics - they pick one topic and stick to it."

I was offended, even though it was just a game. Perhaps I had struggled to explain that I had written in anthologies, as I worried that they wouldn't understand what they were. They put me on the spot to name the books.

The next one they thought was a lie was that I had five sisters. Nobody believes that. It's too many to have. Of course, only one is a full sister, the others share either a father or a mother, not both. They are not step-sisters, though, as that's something different again.

Nobody asked me about Tasmania. Apparently I have a Tasmanian accent, so there was no need to ask me questions. I lived in Tasmania for 16 years, but I wasn't born there. I was born in Melbourne. I've lived about the same amount of time in Tasmania, Melbourne and in the Northern Territory (split between Alice Springs and Darwin). I didn't even think that there was a Tasmanian accent.

One man there could apparently tell that I had a Tasmanian accent. I don't know how you can tell as it is not something I've ever noticed. The only regional accent I was aware of in Australia was in Far-North Queensland, where the speech slows down to nothing.

I had considered a multitude of things that nobody believes, such as:

* I used to share a back fence with Ricky Ponting.
* I used to work for covert operations within Victoria Police.
* I used to do hair modelling.
* I once held the Tasmanian record for Triple Jump.
* I went to the red carpet of the Lion King musical in Melbourne.
* I was a member of the West Coast Eagles cheer squad for two years and went out onto the MCG holding the banner.

And, for my believable lies, there were others I could have chosen:

* My wife was born in Chile (she is Chilean but was not born there).
* I am related to Megan Gale (I'm related to Brendan Gale, not Megan).
* I have a twin cousin who was born on the same day as me (he was born 6 days after me).

I had never played the game before, but it was interesting.

What gets me down

I finished editing my great work, as I call it, Children of the Crescent Moon, yesterday, and hit submit, then went straight onto the 2nd draft of the 2nd book in the series, Eyes of the Crescent Moon. That felt good. Other things did not.

I had to do a personal bio(graphy) for the submission and decided to include my 6 published works, a Choose Your Own Adventure, a short story, a poem, a short story within an anthology, a set of six short stories within an anthology, and a collection of my own works, the latter three being currently available, and it bothered me.

There, in my Facebook inbox, was a message from someone telling me that my cover page for Bob the Potato was no good, and going on for half a page about it. It was an old message, from when that lying person made all sorts of impossible cruel claims about me and encouraged 2,000 people to attack me. I should be laughing at how absurd the complaint was. After all, the reason I didn't have a proper cover page was because the person I had hired to do it, who I paid US $110 to do it, had failed to adhere to their job, doing so because of the lying claims made about me, which was why this person had contacted me to harass me. It was circular logic, but what can I say? Indeed, why am I bothering to respond to someone who harasses me like this because they were told to do it.

It made me think of the various hoaxes that make the rounds on the internet. The one about how if you put in your PIN number on the ATM in reverse then it will call the police. The one about how - well, I don't really need a list. They are everywhere, and stupid people fall for it. They aren't scams simply because they don't include money. It's the same kind of believable lies as the ones who do want money, though. The same people who convince you to give them your credit card number in order to stop you from having a virus - only there is no virus, and it's just an attempt to extort money. Perhaps they are not the same exact people that make the hoaxes, as obviously there is a line in the sand from laughing at someone to laughing and making money at someone, but it's a thin line. Certainly, if you can convince someone to believe that typing your PIN number in reverse can call the police, then you can probably convince them to give up their credit card number too.

Scammers tend to attack the same kind of people all the time. They have them in mind when they launch their attacks. They send out feelers to see if you are going to fall for it. If you respond correctly, then they probably won't bother you too much. I like to think that I respond correctly. Every time I get someone send me a message on Facebook asking me to donate to save starving children in Africa, I block them. Blocking scammers seems to me to be a good way to deal with it.

I have heard that some people go around wasting their time making fun of them, even trapping them, and I tried that myself too, but it just makes me angry. What kind of people would do such evil things?

And then I remember: the same kind of person that would write a lying blog post about someone to try to ruin their writing career.

They attack me because I am a good victim for them. It's not like this is the first such attack I've ever had. I had someone else, a year before this, write some nasty lies about me on his own writing group. In fact, I'm near certain that the two are related. That guy was doing it to cover up the fact that he routinely lies about people and is a gigantic bully. So a second gigantic bully lied about me to cover up his lies. Sighs.

He wasn't the first, though. I had a guy who was going around blackmailing celebrities who took a break from it to try to ruin my life, just for fun. There was no reason for it, and he gained no money out of it, he just liked the fact that I had a diagnosis of autism. And it was really hard to get rid of the lies too.

Encyclopaedia Dramatica, one of those lying places inhabited by trolls, created a page for me that was based on the lies told by the person who was blackmailing celebrities. I decided not to bother complaining about it. After all, people that go there know that they are full of lies. The more I complain, the worse it gets.

The only difference between the earlier efforts and this one is that this one is protected by Wordpress.com (or perhaps .org) who don't allow anyone to sue them without a US court order, a specific type of one that is difficult to get, and even harder if you live outside of USA. I did my sums and worked out that it wasn't worth it. They know that the blog post is defamatory. They know it is illegal. They just simply do not care.

It's the kind of thing that put me in a difficult position. For it to be worth it for me to sue them, I'd need for it to get a lot worse than it is now, and yet I don't want it to get worse.

The writing community is toxic, at least for me. Perhaps people attacked me just because I was worried that they would attack me, which is kind of like a red rag to a bull, or perhaps it is just that people like the abusive lying blogger are running things. After all, writing is about entertainment, and lying about people is entertaining.

One forum website, meant to be for writers, has "Learning About Thick Skin" as its first badge. That's code for "we encourage bullying", of course, which is precisely what they do. They not only told lies about me, but told lies about everyone else too, and told lies about me because I corrected some of the lies they told about everyone else. Yes, bullying for trying to stop their bullying. It's just not worth it.

Perhaps, if I looked through the community, I would find that they are just protective of their members, and my "behaviour" by challenging them about their lying and bullying of others, triggered something.

Yeah, nah, not likely.

If nothing else, life is a lesson, and I have come to learn that it's just not worth it to even respond to certain kinds of people, and certain kinds of responses.

So that person who wrote me half a page going on about a cover that I didn't have anything to do with, and then spent the other half of the page talking about how my story, which I wrote when I was 14, looked like it was written by someone who was 15, and how I should improve it, and I was left with my face in my palm.

There are things I could say, but that person would have to be pretty stupid to come up with such rubbish. Pretty gullible, I should say.

Probably the sort of person likely to fall for a scam to steal their credit card.

And perhaps I can take some solace in the thought that the people who abused me as a result of such an obviously false blog post about me are very stupid and are likely to get scammed by a credit card scammer.

The only problem is that I hate credit card scammers.

If only the world had true justice and it was actually fair.

At least my book is good. It's probably better if I hide myself in my books rather than put up with the idiots who lie about fellow authors.

Progress on my book

On the 5th of May I finished the book I was reading, Dead Centre, and started up my next book, A Game of Thrones. I had never read the book, or any of the other books in the series, but I had watched every episode of the TV series.

My interest in the book was not so much about whether it was any good, or even whether it was better than the TV show, or different to the TV show. My interest, primarily, was how similar it was to my own book.

With baited breath, I opened the first page, and saw a map, then another map, and another map, and I found them to be pleasant and well-made. I was happy. Then I saw a heading of "Prologue" and I had my pre-conceived ideas about what was to come, expecting to have some grandiose story about all that had transpired before the story began, a compacted story of the dawn of men, the battle between the Children of the Forest and the first men, then the long night, the dragon conquests and all of the rest, but instead I had the exact things I had seen in the first episode of the TV show.

It was boring.

Every word was repeated in the TV show, flickering back in my mind like a memory. While it had been years since I had seen it, it seemed to me to be exactly the same, identical even, but somehow worse. The TV show was better than the book, I quickly concluded.

It wasn't until I read the second chapter - or the first real one - that I saw the majesty of the book and how I would use it. The first chapter was not named "Chapter One" or "1" or some cutesy yet annoying name that may as well not be there, but nor was there a child-like name to summarise the chapter. Instead, the chapter name was the name of a character, and, in spite of the addition of maps and a prologue, there was no index.

I flicked through and saw that it was all like this. Some characters had several chapters named in their honour. They were written not in first person but in point of view.

I have written many short stories in first person and a few in point of view, but I had never had a point of view chapter like this. I was curious as to how to do it. Was this what I was looking for? A technique that would work for my book?

The first time I had tried to write Children of the Crescent Moon, when I was just 21 years old, I wanted to write it all in first person as I like writing in first person. I am the main character, a variation of my own life, or at least my imagination of what my life could be, and this is what I am comfortable doing, and yet, for this book, I couldn't do it. The story lends itself to first person and yet there are two, equally important, main characters.

I had argued with several people, some agreeing with me, that I could still have it as first person, but that I would need to alternate between them, but when I tried to write it, and others tried to read it, it just became confusing. Even when I made the chapter names out of the characters whose perspective I was using, it was confusing, and not in a good way.

Third person doesn't work either, not really, as you lose some of the passion. My characters all have unique perspectives, each with their own personality, and, in this story, it is difficult for those personalities to shine through if I do not show things from their point of view.

The other story I am seriously considering turning into a novel, the horror story Karta, is mainly from the perspective of the main character, but I do like to have perspectives of at least some of the others, who meet their demise without the main character being present. It would still mainly be first person, but with snippets from others. It wouldn't work in an alternating point of view style. It wouldn't make sense. That's a survival horror where people die, for the most part, at the hands of ghosts. There is no point giving the perspective of the ghost. You don't want their perspective.

So I started a rewrite of my novel for the first time employing the point of view chapter style.

They are still in third person, but they are written from a point of view chapter perspective. The first chapter is the Prologue, then George, then Sarah, just as the story has always been, and for a while it simply alternates from George to Sarah to George, but then slowly I introduce more characters, and some of them get their own chapters.

I wrote it generally in a similar way to how A Game of Thrones was written, not in terms of content but in terms of style. Is it stealing? I don't think so. He doesn't have a copyright on the method of story telling. My story has few if any similarities.

I decided to change some of my character names too, as a popular, yet unfair, criticism of my novel was that I had too mundane names. So instead of Elizabeth I had Izbeth, instead of Nicholas I had Niklass, and instead of Horace I had Haas. They were subtle changes for relatively minor characters, but I kept going with them. Some of them stayed the same, but others changed. I couldn't bear to change the name of Sabrina nor Bertrand and especially not Cassandra. Those are names I have known and loved for too long. Even D'Char and D'Eliza stayed the same. Herald did not move either. But Horace did. Haas sounded better. Even though it is a name used today in certain characters, it is a bit more fun than Horace. After all, that's all that George RR Martin did with his names. He just used normal names but changed their spelling.

It started out as a bit of an experiment, but as it continued it started to feel really good, and now, as I am nearing the completion, it is starting to feel like this might be my best version yet.

I am up to 210,000 words now. I checked and A Game of Thrones is 280,000. It might be a similar length by the time it is finished. If that is a normal size for a book of that kind, then perhaps it is a target I should aim for. My previous version was just 99,000 words.

Why the length? Partially it is because, with the freedom afforded by point of view chapters, I found myself repeating some things, told from different perspectives. I didn't always do that, but sometimes I provided two or even three perspectives of an incident, different truths, to add depth to what had occurred. It wasn't simply saying the same thing over and over again - it was saying different things, the same thing but presented in different ways.

My story only has one bad guy, it should be noted, yet I have 20 or more good guys, but many of them are manipulated into appearing to be bad guys, so that most of the fighting is good guy versus good guy. So the different perspectives are important, and it helps to understand the degree of manipulation at hand and how it comes to work.

In previous versions I had kept secrets from the reader, the kinds of things that could only be fully understand after 10 or more reads, but in this version I experimented with revealing deep secrets as I went along. I was nervous about doing this but I found that it didn't ruin the story. It made it easier to understand. Even though they were big reveals, there were still deep secrets beyond that, secrets that remain right until the end.

I found myself introducing new characters too, people who of course existed in previous versions but I never allowed them to speak.

And, in spite of the increased length, I cut out some of the boring bits. There was no chase scene through the valley of the sabre-toothed tigers, nor was there the part of the sweet innocent little boy and girl turning horribly evil at the slightest suggestion, nor the bit about using the powers to turn into trees so they could hide.

The thing about the point of view chapters is that I found it easy to cut some out and I might find it easy to cut out more in editing. I'd write down a chapter and then if it felt boring and it didn't advance the plot, then I'd delete it.

I found myself introducing sex too. This has never had explicit sex scenes, but it has always had sex, something that some people have told me I should remain from it. But, as something that is based on a true story, there are certain things that just ruin the story if they are removed, and one of those things is the sex. I don't want to turn it into a porno or anything like that, but I do want to have people having sex, and falling in love. I think that I did it in the right way this time.

I am yet to edit it and I feel like I might just toss out a few entire chapters and even whole character arcs as I go through it. There is one arc that I am a bit nervous about and I might remove.

As I head to my ending, I wonder if I am better to have the glamorous castle battles I was at times encouraged to have, or if I am better to tell my own story. I think I am better to tell my own story, which means that the castle battles look somewhat different to how you usually see them. This is about strategy and manipulation, not raw power.

The novel is almost complete, and once complete then I will worry more about a publisher.

It's better if I have something to show them than to worry about who to show it to. I have always thought that if it is good enough then finding a publisher should be easy, and to worry about making it good first.

Hopefully this time around it is good enough. And hopefully I can finish this before the end of the year.

Editing can be tough.

Game of Thrones

A lot of people who have read or heard of my unpublished novel Children of the Crescent Moon have compared it to Game of Thrones, either or both of the TV series and the books, and it is something that I have been quite interested by.

I first started to develop the book in 1989 and it was based on real life events that started in 1987, while Game of Thrones the book wasn't published until 1996, so there is no way for me to have actually copied it. At worst, it could be considered that, having already established the basic plot, I made alterations to it based on having watch the TV show and/or read the books. Whether that has actually happened is another matter entirely.

Prior to writing the book, I had been a big fan of Star Wars, the movie series, which, prior to my starting the book, had released all three of the "classic trilogy", namely Star Wars (later renamed to "A New Hope"), The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, as well as the Ewok movie. I loved all of them and I considered them to be the very best movie series ever imagined. I went so far as to buy comic books about them, including books that theorised a 9-part movie series, with 3 prequels and 3 sequels. While those books weren't exactly matched by the actual movies, they weren't too far off them, with the prequel series about Anakin before he turned evil while the sequel series was about their children. That idea existed in 1987. It has just been an issue of how to go about the finer elements of it.

So my book was in many ways inspired by Star Wars. In fact, some elements were so heavily influenced by it that I had to change how I wrote it.

My greatest problem with Star Wars has always been that it was set in space. I could see no reason whatsoever that it had to be as part of a planet-hopping space fantasy. To me, the story would have been better had it been told all in the same planet, just moving around that planet, whichever one it was.

Indeed, prior to writing my book, I had written concept plans for a new and improved Star Wars, one that was set on a single planet. I planned it out, wrote the plot, characters, everything about it, and I wrote a short story version of it, of some 30 pages or so. It was fan fiction, though I never showed it to anyone.

However, Star Wars is not the basis of Children of the Crescent Moon, because Children of the Crescent Moon is based on a true story.

In 1987 my maternal grandfather died. Before he died, he said to his wife, his children and grandchildren, including me, his final words, messages he wanted us to remember of him after he died, things he was worried about for the future. What he told me acted as a prediction, and that prediction formed itself into dreams, which in turn formed this book.

The original form of the book therefore was, through the veil of dreams, telling the story that my grandfather predicted.

Later versions were based on a combination of the prediction and what actually happened.

While Lord of the Rings was written long before I was born, I did not read it until much later in life. While I heard about it when I was quite young, my first exposure to the story itself was in the cartoon adaptation of it, which had three movies that told the story from the four novels (The Hobbit plus The Lord of the Rings trilogy), written for children aged 10-12 or thereabouts, as opposed to the movie series which was aimed at 18+ or the original novels which were aimed at around 15-16. The story was the same in all three versions but how it was told differed tremendously.

I watched the cartoon version in 1993, and I can say that it did have some influence on how I wrote my novel. The content wasn't affected but the way it was told was.

Between 2004 and 2006 I read not only all four of the novels but also The Silmarillion and every book JRR Tolkien had ever written, to understand why he wrote such terrible children's stories, such boring essays, and then such a brilliant trilogy.

This writing style and way to write the novel heavily affected how I wrote the 2006 version of my novel. It justified to me that I had taken so long over writing it, and all of the processes I had gone through. It also said to me why, in spite of writing such a good version of the novel, it still wasn't ready to be published.

After all, The Lord of the Rings, in its published form, was somewhat unfinished, as he clearly wrote it originally aimed for children then changed things to make it for an older audience half-way through writing, but some parts were still for children, some parts being a mix of being for children and being for teens and young adults. Some characters weren't fully fleshed out. An extra year or two on writing it and it would have been perfect.

So there I was, writing my book, and criticising what is often claimed to be the greatest movie ever made and the greatest book ever written. Who am I to think that when my own book is unpublished?

And yet that was my aim. I didn't aim to be spoken in the same sentence as those two wonderful productions - I wanted to be better. I wanted this to be the best story ever written, to be made into the best movie ever made, and to simply be the best.

When I first heard of Game of Thrones, it was the TV series, and I thought it was a spin-off from Lord of the Rings. I thought perhaps it was just telling the story of the humans, as opposed to the elves and dwarves, or hobbits. The human storyline of Lord of the Rings was very interesting. Surely that was what it was about.

I eventually watched a bit in the middle of Series 4, and, with my wife, we caught up on the first three seasons, one episode per day, after our Foxtel pay TV subscription let us do it. From Series 5 onwards, we watched it live.

When I saw Game of Thrones, the TV series, my first impression was that this was eerily similar to my novel, more similar than Lord of the Rings, more similar than Star Wars, more similar than anything else ever created.

I then got to wondering if Game of Thrones had copied my novel, if somehow they had got a copy of it.

"Don't be ridiculous - the book it is based on was published in 1996," I was told, but that's 1996, not 1986.

He had 9 years to steal my book and write his own based on it.

But did he?

The first thing to consider is that, while I had the ideas since 1987, I didn't start writing it until 1989, and I didn't finish my first full draft until 1996. Not only that, but the 1996 draft wasn't shared with many people. I never put it online and only showed perhaps 20 people at most.

So then he couldn't have stolen it.

Except that he could have.

In 1993 I wrote a website as part of my university degree, and on that website I included 4 sample chapters, because I wasn't sure where to start in the chronology. Part of me wanted to start at the very start, but then I worried that it would spoil the novel, so I considered 3 other spots further along in the chronology. So I put in sample chapters, just a couple of pages for each stage, and asked people to vote in a poll so I could work out where to start.

That website was viewed more than 20,000 times, according to my counter, and in those days there weren't very many websites.

So it is very possible that George RR Martin, as part of the research of his book, stumbled upon my website.

But is that plagiarism?

The combined total pages of what I shared was 8 pages, probably a bit less, compared to some 600+ pages in the first book of the series, A Game of Thrones. If he did look at my website, then at most it gave him some ideas.

I had watched Star Wars to help me with some ideas for how to frame my story, and I read Lord of the Rings to help me with some ideas for how to go about writing it, so what's the difference between George RR Martin looking at my website for some ideas?

Certainly, the fact that his male lead (Jon Snow) is a ranger is replicated in my writing - and I had the idea first. His female lead (Daenerys) is a princess, as is my female lead. He has a great wall, dragons, and even the powers of the night king are replicated with the powers of my bad guy (though my bad guy is much more powerful).

The thing is that in my sample chapters I simply speak of the powers being able to manipulate the dead, so he could have interpreted that, incorrectly, to being the major power he had. It wasn't, of course. My bad guy could obliterate 1,000 people at once - the night king was nowhere near as strong. Just the same, the general feel was the same.

Of course, the book as a whole is more than just those sample chapters. I released them online knowing that they didn't equate to the whole novel. The fact that George RR Martin's stories have a significant similarity to my 4 sample chapters does not mean that the book as a whole does.

There are more differences than similarities between the two works, and I'll explain them here.

I have one religion and one religion only, albeit with supplemental religions such as the worship of dragons, the atheist beliefs of the swinekin, and the beliefs of the fae. He has the new Gods and the old Gods, with vastly different themes.

I have 12 kingdoms and 12 symbols of the Gods, focusing around the moon theme. He has 7 kingdoms in Westeros and 7 parts of the new Gods. Different number, if nothing else.

I don't have any old Gods, only the fae, who are real people. He has old Gods galore, including the drowned God, Rh'llor and the God of Many Faces. I don't have anything like that.

He has the Children of the Forest essentially to replace my fae, but his Children of the Forest are nowhere near as powerful as my fae. My fae are stronger than the Gods themselves - the Children of the Forest were easily dispatched by a few wights. My fae are, in their true form, red-haired giants (though I didn't reveal that in my sample chapters) while his Children of the Forest aren't even shapeshifters.

I had people raised from the dead to use as puppets, mostly as bombs to go off, especially including brain bombs. He had that being the main power of the night king. My undead could wipe out 1,000 people in one go when their brain bombs exploded, while his undead struggled to kill one person, and it'd typically take 20 of them to take out 1.

I had a lot of dragons, dozens of them, and they were very much alive and free. He had 3, and they had to be hatched from dragon eggs.

My dragon lords were basically kind of evil. While not completely evil, they were kind of evil. My main heroes were most certainly not dragon lords - though they did end up riding dragons.

Dragons were set up as demi-Gods, who were worshipped in a God-like fashion by the dragon lords. Nothing like that happened in Game of Thrones.

Game of Thrones had face-changers. My heroes had the ability to do that.

My wall encompassed the entire continent, and it was disguised as a mountain, while his only separated the north from the far north.

He had lords, called Sers, and knights. I didn't have any lords at all, going straight from kings and queens down to commoners.

Is my book better? I certainly think so.

I started reading the book a few weeks ago and I am not impressed. The grammar is horrible and it just seems boring. Perhaps it gets better later on, and perhaps it seems worse as it is so similar to the TV series, but it just doesn't impress me.

One thing I noticed was that every chapter is a POV chapter, which is how I initially wrote my book, and how the sample chapters were written. People told me that they hated doing it that way so I was told to write in third person, but I've always thought that that was the better way to do it, for my story at least.

So in my latest version I am experimenting with telling it with POV chapters again, but doing it in the way that George RR Martin did in A Game of Thrones.

Certainly he has no claim to sue me for plagiarism but I probably don't have a whole lot of claim to sue him either.

He probably did read my website, though, but he's probably allowed to.

About Karta: The Island Of The Dead

This blog post is about Karta: The Island Of The Dead, both the physical place, known in English as Kangaroo Island, and about my as yet unpublished novel about it.

When I went to Kangaroo Island for the first time, in 2008, I wasn't planning to write a novel about it. It was just a fun trip, a time to get away from it all. Kangaroo Island, I was told, was still very much an unspoiled wilderness, still somewhere that animals roamed free, in pretty much their natural habitat. While there was a population of some 4,000 to 5,000 people, given the sheer enormity of the size of the island, it was basically unspoiled.

I had also heard that one of my ancestors had been the first white man to set foot on Kangaroo Island. I wanted to find out if it was true.

On the island, I went on a tour, a day trip which took me around the entire island, one of those things aimed at foreigners, not people who have lived in Australia all their lives. We went on a bus, some 50 of us or so, stopping off to see the seals, the penguins, eagles, and, of course, the kangaroos that the island is named after.

Most of them went back home, back on the ferry on the way back, oblivious to anything deeper than their little taste of what the island had to offer, but I had decided to stay a second night, to do my own thing, and see what was there.

I wasn't the only one with that idea, and there were four of us in total who arrived together the night before the tour. A couple from Italy had gone on the tour with me then were doing their own thing on the same day as me. Another guy, travelling by himself, had done his own thing on the day that we were on tour, then was going on tour while we did our own thing.

He told us that the lighthouses were something that had to be seen to be believed, and the museums offered incredible insight.

Museums seemed to be just about everywhere, with one right by the entrance, right next to the jetty. I went in there and there were books galore telling about tragedy on the island, shipwrecks mostly, but then other tragedies. They were supposed to be true first-hand accounts of people who saw the horrible tragedies, some who survived to tell the tale and others who witnessed what occurred.

I was surprised to see dolphins as the cause of the shipwrecks, not manatees like you normally hear. Of course, there were no manatees near Kangaroo Island, but it was a strange thing for me. The idea that dolphins had lured people to their deaths was incredible to me. The tales didn't say "mermaids" or "sirens" or anything silly like that: they said dolphins. Over and over again, it was said to be dolphins.

They were ridiculed, of course. They had survived terrible tragedies where 1,000 people died, but as soon as they mentioned dolphins as the cause nobody would listen.

Other books didn't mention the dolphins, for fear of ridicule, skirting around the issue, and simply saying how the lighthouses failed, how a fog suddenly arrived as if from nowhere, and people died in their thousands.

I decided to head up to one of the lighthouses and incredibly heard the tale of how lighthouse keepers died one after the other, pushed from the lighthouses to their deaths by some unseen force. They were forbidden from working any of the lighthouses yet had to keep them. Ships were banned from travelling nearby, as were planes. Only one plane and one ferry was allowed, and both were blessed meticulously each time. Without the blessing, they too would die.

I was shown newspaper article after newspaper article, and even one book by a lighthouse keeper. I was told it was the same in the other lighthouses too. I was even allowed to read the book, not being forced to buy it. It was the same in the museums - they didn't care about selling their books.

"So where is the ghost tour?" I asked, thinking that surely this was leading up to something.

"There is no ghost tour," the lighthouse keeper told me.

I was told about a cottage, one of three, Hope, Faith and Charity, where I could find out more about the history. They weren't museums so much as they were heritage buildings, kept in pristine condition.

On the way there I stumbled upon a statue. It was just kind of there, not marked, almost hidden, behind a bush. If I wasn't so clumsy I wouldn't have seen it. There was a man with three women reaching up to him, and many children behind him. I didn't know what it represented or who he was. There was no label underneath.

"That's Governor Wallace," they told me at the cottage. "He was the first man on Kangaroo Island - the first person."

I remembered that I was told that the first white man on Kangaroo Island was one of my relatives. Was Governor Wallace one of my relatives? Wallace Meredith?

They couldn't tell me for sure, but they told me what a good man he was, how his religion, that of the Freemasons, became the official religion of Kangaroo Island.

In a second cottage I was shown the religion, including the sacrifice room, where they had at one point conducted human sacrifices.

"He sacrificed two of his three Aboriginal wives," the caretaker happily told me, "and 23 of his 27 children."

He was a mass murderer but they were praising him? I had to look at them twice, to see if it was a joke. Apparently not.

"He saved the island, kept it safe. He still watches over us," they told me.

There was a third cottage, they told me, but I wasn't allowed there. That was the worship room. That was only for residents of the island.

"Move here and we will show you the third cottage," they told me.

I didn't think I wanted to move there.

I was shaken from my visit to the cottages, worse when I found out that only one cottage was opened.

But I had seen two.

The other two, I was told, were in disrepair. They weren't open to the public because they weren't safe.

The one I saw wasn't in disrepair. Why were they lying? The third one they didn't say was in disrepair either.

Perhaps the most shocking thing was when I went to get dinner at the local Fish and Chips shop, and I got to talking to one of the owners about what I had seen.

"We don't want to be here," she told me, then smiled and laughed with customers as if to hide the secrets she was telling me. I didn't know her either so why did she trust me?

She told me how house prices are cheap there, and a lot of people, who can't afford the prices on the mainland, moved there, sometimes to retire, or sometimes thinking they can make money from the tourist trade, but it's blood money.

"Not everyone makes it back from those day tours," she told me.

I remembered having to sign a waiver that if we died on the tour that we wouldn't sue the company. One of the tour guides even joked about it.

"How many people die exactly?" I asked her.

"Each day people die. Every day. Not a lot. Sometimes one, sometimes two. Sometimes tourists, sometimes locals. Enough for them to hide. Always accidents. The kinds of things that happen anywhere. Only they happen more often here. And they are not accidents," she told me.

Accidents that are not accidents. So like that movie "Final Destination", I mused.

"Final Destination was probably based on what really happens here," she warned me. "Only they aren't dying because death wants them. It's evil spirits. They kill good people to try to follow them into the afterlife."

She was serious. She looked scared, like she was worried that she might die any moment.

"I can't get off here. The island won't let me go. I've tried so many times. We've both tried. Just about everyone on the island wants to leave. It's terrible here. But we can't leave," she was almost crying.

She tried to explain it to me, but it was too hard for me to understand. She told me that when I make it back, and she was sure I would, that I should research it, but don't type in Kangaroo Island. "Type in Karta," she told me. "That's the real name of this place."

We all talked about our experiences when we were back, the four of us. The Italian couple had travelled to the far end of the island, and had been to all four lighthouses, all telling the same chilling tale. They were convinced that it was to sell books, or for some ghost tour.

But they let us read the books for free. We could buy them if we wanted to but we didn't have to. Nobody bought the books.

I got home and looked it up.

Karta was the Aboriginal name for hell.

Or close enough to it.

In Aboriginal beliefs, in their religion, they believe that when you die you go to a special island, to Karta, where you are judged as to whether you were good or evil. If you are good, you go up to the afterlife, to the Milky Way, where you live forever in the stars. If you are evil, you stay on Karta until you have paid for your crimes. How long you stay on Karta depends on how good you are.

So everyone goes to Karta, not just good, not just evil. Everyone.

It went on about how, if you are really evil then they give you a second chance, to live as your totem animal. If your totem was a kangaroo, then you would be reborn, on Karta, as a kangaroo. Then, if you lived a good life as a kangaroo, then, once you died, you could go to the Milky Way.

No human is meant to go to Karta, not while alive. To do so is to corrupt the process. They might try to kill you, to follow you into the afterlife, and never learn their lessons.

We weren't meant to be there. Those animals were not animals. They were people trying to make amends for living a wicked life.

The funny thing is that there were many Kartas, not just this one, but all of the others had no real place. In the north, Karta was an imaginary island in the middle of the sea, one that nobody could visit. The only Karta that could be visited was Kangaroo Island. For the others, you could only go there when you were dead.

Books had been written about Karta, not just about the Kangaroo Island one, but about the others too.

Wikipedia claimed that there was proof that Aboriginals had lived there at one point, but Aboriginals themselves disagreed.

The evidence of tools did not prove anyone living was ever there, they told me. It just proved that the dead could manifest, that the animals were really people. It did not prove what Wikipedia said it proved.

Then I found out that Governor Wallace's real name was George Meredith, and he was one of my ancestors. My great-great-great-great uncle.

I breathed a sigh of relief when I found out it was indirect, not direct. There was a George Meredith who was a great-great-great-grandfather, but it was a different George. This one was an uncle.

"That's why most of the Merediths in Australia are black," I was told.

Most, but not all. But, as with most families who have been in Australia for as long as our family had, there was a good smattering of Aborigines in our gene pool, and not just from Governor Wallace.

I wasn't going to write a book about it. I don't have anyone's permission. I could get permission, perhaps, but only some will give it. The people who run the museums might give it, but some say things that others contradict. Some want things to be told, others don't. The lighthouse keepers want it to be told, but not the people who run the cottages. They don't want anyone to say a single bad thing about Governor Wallace.

You'd think that a mass murderer would be thought of worse than that, but he actually isn't. Even Aborigines were sympathetic. They blamed the evil spirits, not him. He was a nice guy before he went to Karta. That's why you shouldn't go to Karta, I was told.

It's hard to know what to believe and what not to believe, but it makes a good story, a really good story.

I have only written a short story version of it, 20,000 words, a novella they tell me. It is not yet ready to be made into a novel.

A lot of people want to read it, though. I'm even tempted to release it before Children of the Crescent Moon.

About Children of the Crescent Moon

This blog post is devoted to my unpublished novel Children of the Crescent Moon. As it is unpublished, there is no link to buy it or read it, though I do have a Facebook group about it, with currently 1,399 members, though it is also about other writing projects as well.

Visit my writing group about Children of the Crescent Moon

When I was 14 years old I had a short story and a poem both submitted to Puffinalia by my school, nominated as the school's best writing for that month, and they were both then published in Puffinalia as well, with the first one, Bob the Potato, winning the short story of the month award for June 1989 while the second one, a poem called Hopelessness, was simply published in the August 1989 edition of the same monthly magazine. They both won other awards at school as well, and were up on display in the hallways for parents, teachers, students and family members to view, along with the other pieces that various students had written or drawn or painted. They were both up there for several months each, for all to see.

Sometime after that, I was phoned by someone from Penguin Books, the publisher who owned Puffin Books and in turn owned Puffinalia. The phone call was kind of a part of the whole point behind Puffinalia, which was to encourage children to write. I was thus encouraged to write a novel.

"We are sure that you have one good novel in you," the voice on the other end encouraged me, "and we want to be the ones who help you to publish it."

There was no guarantee that they would publish it. All they promised was to consider it, to read it and tell me honestly if it was any good. If it was good enough, they would publish it straight away. If it was not quite there, then they'd give me hints and tips for what I had to change. If it was terrible, they'd tell me to try something else. If it was really awful, then they might even want me to go away.

The problem was that I had no idea what to write about and, with all of the pressures of Grade 10 looming, the last thing I wanted to do was to write a novel.

That was in 1989, and, while they didn't give me an actual deadline, I kind of knew that I basically had a year, or maybe two years at most. Puffin Books published books by children for children, and at your 16th birthday they no longer considered you to be a child. That put my deadline at 1st of January 1991, as on the 2nd I would turn 16. I basically had 13 months to write a novel or else the offer was off the table.

I had a few thoughts about it and basically it was the true story behind the two pieces they had published. Both Bob the Potato and Hopelessness were really about what was going on in my life right then. The problem was that I couldn't talk about it. I couldn't tell anyone. Even writing a fictional story about it was risky. Even writing a metaphor was terrifying. Yet I kind of knew that this was what story I had to write.

I got my awards at the end of 1990, where they put me on the honour roll for the first time, an achievement that would set me up for a good matriculation college, a good university and then a good career. That was more important than a book. I had also won a scholarship for most improved, laughably because my average marks were no different. I had lowered my marks in English and History so as to raise them in Science and Accounting. I was aiming for that honour roll, focusing my attention in areas that made me look good. I got the highest marks in the school in 3 subjects, none of which were English. I knew I couldn't get top in English so didn't bother. I could get top in Maths and Accounting, though, as well as in Advanced Mathematics. They didn't give me the awards, though. The scholarship, a one-off payment of some $900, was instead of the awards they should have given me.

If I had written that novel then, when Penguin wanted me to, there was no way I would have had enough time to get such good marks. It was a choice I made. I went for a sensible option instead of a hope and dream. And with it I threw away the offer that Penguin had made.

The story didn't disappear from my thoughts, though, and eventually, in 1996, when I was 21 years old, some 7 years after I was asked to write it, I finally wrote it all down. It was after something happened in real life, a terrible tragedy called The Port Arthur Massacre. It made major worldwide news. Nobody believed me when I said that that was a part of the story I was writing about. Nobody had believed me when I warned them it was going to happen, either. Nobody would believe my story. I had to fictionalise it.

So I wrote it down. I called it Star Children. I read over it. It was a nice plan but there was something wrong about it. It was the best thing I'd ever written, but it could be better. I wasn't happy with it.

My sister had a look at it and she told me that I'd gone too far in hiding the fact that it was based on a true story. I had called my main characters Xyxylix and Zykklik. I had set it on a distant planet with creatures unheard of on earth. It was too different. It was hard to relate to.

Most importantly, though, I didn't have a satisfactory ending.

The offer from Penguin was off the table but I knew that if I could make it good enough I could submit it anyway. Forget about any promises. I just needed to make it good.

It was too much like Star Wars. It read like a Star Wars fan fic. That wasn't what I wanted. I needed to get rid of the Star part of the title. So I replaced it with Moon. Moon Children didn't sound right either. That made me think of werewolves. So I went with Children of the Crescent Moon. That was fine.

Someone later claimed that Crescent Moon was a symbol of Islam. It isn't actually, though it is a symbol often associated with Arab countries, who in turn is the major place where Islam exists. Just the same, the Crescent Moon exists in other religions too. It is a symbol of awakening power. Sailor Moon had a crescent moon and she isn't Muslim.

In 1999 something happened: my step father died. He died sitting on the toilet, with a bottle of beer in one hand and a burned out cigarette in the other. It wasn't a satisfactory end, as we really wanted him to die from being shot by police, or dying in prison. He had gotten away with his crimes, only to die, sitting on the toilet, at the age of 38. We presumed it was a heart attack but didn't bother with an autopsy. His body was found some 3 days after he had died.

I had my ending.

Of course, I didn't have that ending. I made a metaphor for it. I had a few goes at it but then I had one that I was happy with. I realised that I didn't need an epic ending, that I was better off with a realistic one, one that made you think.

My novel was complete.

My sister called someone she knew at Penguin and got them to have a read of it.

"It's terrible," he told me. "We are not publishing that."

My heart sank. I thought it was pretty good. The plot was amazing. It was unique. It was unusual. It was unlike anything anyone had ever done before.

"It's just too rough for us, too raw, and the thought that you spent 10 years getting to this is worrying for us," he told me.

I was just about in tears.

I am a bad writer, I told myself.

So that was it, the end of my dream. I'd throw it away, never to be looked at again. I tried, and I failed.

Giving up on that dream was replaced with real life, getting my first real job at the age of 25, as opposed to the silly jobs I had had before juggling for a living, or helping to run children's parties, face painting, or taking kids for rides on horses. That was all fantasy. In reality I would type hospital notes, write reports about children who were abused. Write recommendations for who got custody of children. They weren't even my decisions. I was just typing. I had to give up on dreams. I was at least a professional writer, just not a fiction writer.

I got some work writing sports writing too, starting at a website called Cricinfo during the 1999 World Cup in England, and then expanding after that. A former cricket player called Sunil Gavaskar recommended me. Some of my writing was highly thought of. Others were ridiculed. I just focused on the stuff people liked, the things that were read a million times each, which were reported about on TV.

I was offered paid work a few times but the sums of money were tiny so I didn't bother. $10 here, $20 there, even $50 a couple of times, but I told them to keep my money. Wait until it is good enough for a big pay packet, I told them.

One ended up front page of a Bangladesh newspaper called Prothom Alo, read by 525,000 people. Another was Page 3 of The Age, read by 700,000 people. One they used in the Argus Review into why Australia had lost the 2010/11 Ashes. High-profile celebrities were talking about my work. I wasn't even making any money out of it.

I was a professional writer, writing for a hospital, and my articles were appearing in major newspapers and magazines, at least occasionally. But my novel wasn't going anywhere.

In 2006 I worked out my story, and wrote it down again.

I wasn't sure if it was going to be any good. The 2002 and 2003 versions were terrible, worse even than the one that was rejected back in 1999. But, as I finished it off, I knew that this one was good.

"I'm sending it to Penguin," my sister told me, after she had read it.

"I didn't ask you to send it off. I wanted to know what you think," I told her.

"This is good. This is really good. They'll publish it for sure. I can guarantee they will," she told me.

Suddenly I got a phone call from a guy at Penguin, a senior editor apparently. We hadn't set up a meeting, he just called.

"We'd like to publish your book," he told me. "I've read the manuscript and it is simply brilliant. We think it will sell a lot of copies."

"How many?" I asked him.

"At least 20,000, maybe even 50,000," he told me. "It's hard to say for sure but we are confident it will be a best seller. This is going to be huge."

I stopped. "So not as big as Harry Potter then?"

He paused. "Harry Potter was a fluke, a once in a generation story."

"I didn't like it much. I found it to be average. It showed that she was a first-time writer. Her later works were better."

"Yes but that was unique and unusual. Nobody had ever written like that before."

"My work is unique and unusual. My work is more unique and more unusual. Surely my work can compete with Harry Potter."

"20,000 copies is a lot of copies. Aren't you satisfied with that?"

I sighed. I didn't want to sound arrogant, but to be honest I wasn't happy with that. I wanted more. I was expecting a million.

"How many copies do you want it to sell?"

"A million," I answered.

"A million? No, this one won't sell a million copies. Well, I mean, it might, but no, I doubt it. You'd have to be very lucky."

I should have been jumping up and down. Penguin were going to publish my novel. But I wasn't. I knew it wasn't ready.

The guy seemed to sense how I was feeling, so he asked me.

"On a scale of 0 to 10, with 10 being the best it could be, and 0 being worthless, how would you rate your novel as it exists right now?" he asked me.

I had to think about it. "7," I told him finally. "7 out of 10."

It was a test, of course. If I lied and told him 10 out of 10 when it wasn't, then he wasn't going to deal with me, but if I was honest and said anything other than 10 out of 10 then he was going to tell me to go back and do more. It was like a trap, a trap that I couldn't wriggle out of.

"We can help you to improve it a bit. If it was a 9 out of 10 then we could work with you to get it to 10 out of 10. We could maybe even do it from an 8 out of 10. But not from a 7. From a 7, all we can do is get it to an 8. We can't get it to the level that you want it to get to."

I had that sinking feeling, that horrible feeling like I had wasted an opportunity.

"So what do you want me to do?" I asked him.

"We are prepared to publish it now if you want to, and it can be that first novel that so many people write that isn't all that good, then focus on your second novel, which will be better. Just like JK Rowling with Harry Potter, her first book wasn't as good as her second, so we can do the same thing with you, and publish this average, or slightly better than average book, and then your second one will be better," he told me.

"I don't want to waste this one as a first novel. It's too important to release it as an average book," I told him, hating my own words.

"Then we need you to improve it yourself. Go back and elevate it. Take it from a 7 to an 8 then from an 8 to a 9. Come back to us when it is a 9 out of 10," he told me.

"How will I know?" I asked him.

"You'll know. You knew when you had elevated it before, didn't you?"

"Yeah."

"So you'll know this time."

And so we "shook hands", as it were, agreeing to our verbal agreement that I would come to them again not with one elevation but with two.

After that, in 2011, I had an elevation, and I so desperately wanted to contact them, but I resisted the urge.

Then in 2018 I had a second elevation.

"It's ready," I told myself, and I knew it was.

"Nobody reads books anymore," their receptionist told me when I called them, refusing to pass me on to the editor. I wondered if it would have helped if I had just gone down to their offices with my manuscript and just sat there waiting.

My book was 9/10. It was bubbling, bursting with brilliance. It was going to sell a million copies like this. I knew it would.

But Penguin didn't care.

"Go into the open submissions call the same as everyone else," the receptionist told me.

For 6 months they didn't have one. Then they had a competition for the best story of the year. I had to enter it, and win it, if I was to be published with them.

I could have gone with a literary agent, only in Australia they ban fantasy, and not a single one would even look at it. Overseas literary agents were fine, but they could only represent me to overseas companies, and only literary agents in USA would even do that.

I contacted one US-based literary agent, who replied by telling me that I was in Australia and so she wouldn't represent me. She hadn't even read it, or even the start of it. It took 3 months to get that response.

With baited breath I waited for the outcome of the competition. If my book was worth a million sales, then surely it'd win this competition.

"We're sorry but we have decided not to accept any fantasy submissions," read the e-mail, "and as such your submission has been removed from the competition."

Penguin had changed their rules mid-competition. They were no longer accepting any fantasy.

Nor was anyone.

"It's temporary," they told me. "It's just until the market stops being so oversaturated with fantasy novels."

It isn't fantasy, of course, not really. It's based on a true story. It's more true than the one that won the competition, about a car crash and how two sisters who were in the car crash had very different views of what happened. This one is about child abuse. This one is more important.

I haven't given up on it, far from it, it's just that it's difficult. It was hard to write, and even harder to publish it. Not because it's bad but just because of all of the silly little rules they have.

I could, of course, publish it with a minor publisher. I could obviously self-publish it too. But I'd kind of look a bit silly if I did that now. If I was going to do that, I should have just accepted the 2006 offer.

Different people have given me different perspectives of it. Some have told me I am too slow in writing it or that I upset Penguin too much by rejecting their offer. I don't know about that. It didn't take me a long time to write it. I just wanted it to be good. I refused to present something that wasn't good.

How long would a second novel take me to write? Probably 2 months. I have 12 planned. I could probably get them out in a year if I was doing it full-time, if I was paid a living wage to write them.

I'm not a professional writer. I mean, I am, but I'm not a professional fiction writer. I have other things going on. This isn't all I do.

I finally worked out a nice short blurb for it:

"Two children with incredible powers must kill the greatest hero the world has ever known."

It's funny how I can summarise a 12 year period of my life, metaphorically described in this novel that took me some 30 years to write, in a single sentence, in two lines. It hardly seems right.

It's a super hero story at its heart. They have a power that can do almost anything. They can disintegrate an entire city instantly with a mere thought, so long as their hands are touching. They can kill a million people at once. They could destroy the entire earth if they wanted to. But why would you want to?

On the other side is the hero, who has the same power but he doesn't have to hold anyone's hand. His power relies on their power existing. He doesn't want to kill them: he just wants them to be kept apart. They don't want to kill him either: they just want to go on with their lives, except that they can't, for if they do that then he will enslave all of humanity. They have to kill him. If they don't then everyone is enslaved, or worse.

There's so many stories within the story too. It's about religion, from the perspective that all of the world's religions are the same religion, but told from different points of view. It's about humanity's origins, explaining how we came to be. It has mythology within it, legends within it.

There is only one bad guy in this story. Everyone else is doing bad things because they think they have to, because they think it's justified, because they think it is good in some secret way overall. There's only one good guy too, but it isn't either of my main characters. The one good guy is a girl, a newborn baby when the story starts, who they don't meet until later. She is someone whose parents and whole family was brutally murdered, her mother taking her to safety with 4 spears lodged in her back, dying when she gives her up, then the woman who takes her has her own family murdered too, in punishment for taking the child, and then she too eventually dies, giving the child to the children, to the heroes of my story, and they adopt her as their daughter. The little girl, with no powers whatsoever, is why they win. She is the only one with a pure heart, the only one who is honest, who never tells a lie, who is always good. They don't win because they have powers. They win because they tell the truth and do the right thing.

I remember on his deathbed my Granddad told me what was to come and told me what I had to do. He made me promise that I would stop what was to come, even if it cost me my life. If I didn't promise, and didn't stop it, then I would certainly die, killed by what was to come.

He was right, of course, but at 12 years old I didn't really understand why.

Children of the Crescent Moon isn't my story, though. This is your story. It is a story that you can relate to, to apply as a metaphor for whatever you might be going through, as a roadmap to survive, a way to cope, a way to win through to the other side.

If you have never had anything bad happen in your life, then this is just a fun little fantasy, but if you have had something bad happen, and want to see that little ray of hope, or a way to get through it, this is that hope.

That's what my story is about.

About Tales From The Aether

This blog post is about my book titled Tales From The Aether, which was originally titled Bob The Potato And Other Stories.

Like all of my work released through Amazon, the major reason to release this at all was so that I could meet the requirements I was told by Harper Collins that I needed to meet in order for them to consider my novel, Children of the Crescent Moon, which is to have 5 books published in the last 2 years. They had told me that anthologies and even self-published books and short stories were okay, so I had thought that I could release my short story Bob the Potato and also my poem Hopelessness.

The plan had been to release Bob the Potato on the 30 year anniversary of its original release, when it was published as part of the Puffinalia magazine, where it won the award for story of the month for June 1989. My planned release date therefore was June 2019. I was then going to consider releasing Hopelessness on the 30 year anniversary of its release date, in the August 1989 edition of Puffinalia.

I knew that Bob the Potato was short, but, as far as I knew, Amazon had no minimum size on books, nor did they have a minimum price. So my plan was to release it as the 699 words, or 3 pages, that it was, and to set a price that is appropriate for that, which I thought was fair at about 5 or 10 cents. I thought I might go up to 20 cents but no more than that.

I thought that there was probably a market for that, for short reads that cost basically nothing, and I thought that I could hit that market, for people who want a quick read for something enjoyable. It sure was loved initially.

I was certain that it would get nothing but 5 star reviews, or perhaps the odd 4 star review mixed in, and maybe average 4.9 stars or so. I was also sure that it would get a lot of sales.

What I hadn't counted on were Amazon's inflexible rules.

Minimum price 99 cents, minimum size 25 pages.

Ugh.

It could be shorter than that on Kindle, but then, at least for my family and close friends, none of them even had Kindle so I needed to at least have a paperback version of it. They didn't care how much it cost.

So the basic plan was that my family and friends would buy the paperback and then people off the street would buy the Kindle version for 5 or 10 cents, or 20 cents at most.

When I found out that I had to charge 99 cents, I was tempted to abandon the whole thing, and, in retrospect, I probably should have. Of course, I had no idea what was to come, but I still knew that this wasn't right.

The thing is that I didn't have to release this. I had already made money from this. It was kind of cheating to re-release something that is already out there. While Puffinalia of June 1989 is no longer in circulation and was only ever available in Australia and New Zealand, you can still get a hold of it in certain libraries. For people who had bought the original magazine it was in, they would be kind of offended at having to pay for it again. That magazine sold for $8 per copy. Why would they want to pay another $1 just for me?

So I had the heartbreaking decision of whether to abandon it, or at least abandon releasing it in Amazon, or to do something else.

I could have gone Kindle-only, it should be noted, but then that's like a giant middle finger to my family and friends, since it couldn't be released on paperback without getting to the 25 page minimum. Even still, 99 cents for 3 pages is a massive rip-off.

So I decided to add Hopelessness to it.

The two don't really go together, as everyone who loves Bob the Potato hates Hopelessness and vice versa, but what else could I do?

And I released a third story, The Form And The Substance, which I had only written a month beforehand.

I felt terrible about it, as 3 stories works out at 33 cents each on Kindle, yet my price range was 5-10 cents. I was ripping people off really. I should have 10 stories really. I was just ugh.

Of course, I later did push it out to 7 stories, and 30 pages, and then changed its name to Tales From The Aether. I could have gone out to 10 stories but by that stage I couldn't be bothered with it.

"I never thought I'd end up hating a potato," was one review, which really summed it up.

This ended up being the subject of a smear campaign, one with three layers no less.

The first layer was to pretend that I had attacked someone criticising it as not being good, when in reality they (1) had not bought it (2) had not read it (3) had not criticised it (4) I had not responded (5) I had blocked them and (6) what they had written was a threat to destroy my writing career.

That was the first layer, resulting in 150 people writing abusive comments to me on Facebook, a mild annoyance as I had to press "block" 150 times.

The second layer was to start a campaign to downvote my book on Amazon, which resulted in: (1) 6 x fake 1-star reviews (2) 2 x fake 2-star reviews (3) 2 people changing regions from USA to UK just to write fake reviews (4) 2 fake reviews on Goodreads (5) Dozens of comments asking for people to downvote me (6) A genuine 5-star review being downvoted until Amazon incorrectly removed it.

Then came the third layer.

A fake blog post was created which mentioned me by name and essentially gave people reason to murder me, by making appalling accusations against me that were too nasty to write here. I go over them in some depth on my own counter-blog post here:

The Tale Of the Lying Writer

It was shared on Facebook by 560 people, with 2,000 unique visitors, and it resulted in Hydra Productions cancelling my contract with them to produce Karta as part of their Abhorrence anthology (originally created for Karta by Emily Piland), and Angela Kay refusing to finish her design for the cover for Tales From the Aether, in spite of charging me US $110 for it, money she took but refused to deliver on.

I also had someone try to kill me over it.

All of this so I could re-publish my much-loved cute and innocent story about Bob the Potato.

I never meant for this to happen.

If I had it to do again, once I found out that Amazon had too high a minimum page limit and too high a minimum price, even for Kindle, I would have cancelled the project.

I didn't need for this story to be re-published. I only did it to impress Harper Collins.

But does this really impress them?

If you do end up reading the book, let me know what you think, good or bad, but most importantly honest. I am beyond caring if this gets low reviews. With 8 fake reviews on Amazon, and 2 on Goodreads, it's not like fake reviews are going to hurt it either.

Tales From The Aether

About Cold Cases

This blog post is about my second book released, and first one written, Cold Cases.

So I'll start at the start with this one.

So my novel, Children of the Crescent Moon, was finished in June 2018 and to my surprise Penguin, who had previously promised to publish it back in 2006, were now no longer talking to me. It's one thing if they told me it stunk but I didn't even get to talk to anyone. I think I took a bit longer than they wanted me to take over it. Anyway so that led me to talk to Harper Collins, who told me that they thought I should prove that I am a good writer not with this novel but with other published works. They told me that it could be anything, self-published, short stories, or even anthologies, and they suggested an anthology. They said that they wanted 5 published works in 2 years.

So I didn't know if they were just messing with me or if this was legitimate but it made sense to me that it was a good idea to have 5 published works either way, even if Harper Collins weren't actually going to look at it. I was a bit unclear if it meant 5 stories or 5 publications but either way that was my magic number.

The first anthology I stumbled upon was called Realm of Mystery, which was put out by Rhet Askew and was advertised in a Facebook group called Writers Unite.

So I joined the group and tentatively agreed to submit a story to the anthology, not knowing for sure if it was going to be accepted. My plan was to submit one and only one, and then the other four would be with four other anthologies, maybe through them, or maybe through someone else. I thought it'd be more impressive to be with five different publishers.

The first one I went with was a thriller I had written sometime earlier about an impossible death, which I had originally titled "Ghosts of the Past" but then for the mystery I changed its name to "When The Spooks Were Spooked" and then even went through a third change to call it "The Impossible Death of Major Nelson". In Cold Cases it appears as "When The Spooks Were Spooked".

The basic story there is that an army major is found dead while cleaning his guns, but none of the weapons have discharged and that isn't what killed him - he was poisoned from the soup he was eating, which has spilled on the floor. But who poisoned it? Nobody was there, and video surveillance proved he had had no visitors for more than two weeks. So was it a suicide? Or what was going on? And then comes the fact that he could very well have been killed by a ghost, one who was manipulated as part of his work, where they take soldiers who have recently died and use an EMF machine to stop them from going to the afterlife, then torture their disembodied spirit, as a way to try to turn them into weapons of war, only it didn't work.

Now, I thought that this was a fun kind of science fiction/horror kind of story but with a thriller/mystery edge, the kind of thing I often write, and, for The Realm of Mystery, it was happily accepted, and I was told by the publisher that it was really good.

Then I found out that you could have up to 5 stories in a single anthology, but only one could be 5,000 words - the others had to be under 2,000 words.

So I was thinking that 5 was my magical Harper Collins number, so what if I could get all 5 published in the same book? Then I could get my novel published immediately.

So off I went planning the others, and I got to 2, 3, 4, 5 and even 6 - though they told me they couldn't accept the 6th.

I wanted them to pick the best 5 out of 6 but they told me it didn't work that way, so I just had the 5, and all was good.

The first one had already been accepted so I waited tentatively to see if any others would be. Second one - yes. Third one - yes. Fourth one - yes. Fifth one - yes! Wow! I was suddenly thinking wow as soon as this goes out I can go to Harper Collins and get my novel published and we're good.

Now, how good were the stories? I thought that they were pretty good, to be honest. They told me that they were good. Each one I went through my normal writing process with - I thought of what to write, had a sleep, dreamed of what to write, then woke up and wrote it all down, then edited it as needed.

I was very excited, almost jumping up and down excited. My book would finally be published! I was also excited that it'd be done quickly. Oh and yes, as an afterthought, the anthology would be published too. I was kind of excited about that too, but only what it meant as far as my novel was concerned.

I had to calm myself down, though. Just because they've said yes doesn't mean that they will make the final cut. Other stories might be submitted later that are better. I might only have 4 stories, or even 3, or maybe only 2. In theory it might be just 1. It was possible even that none would make the final cut.

I just had to wait, and to cross my fingers that they would make the final cut.

Then someone came in to the group asking for advice about whether to make a collection all in one go or spaced out over a period of time. I said that in my opinion collections are better written over a long period of time.

I didn't think that my opinion was controversial. Everyone else said the same thing. But for some reason the poster hated it, and went so far as to talk about reporting me for my post. An admin came in and calmed them down and gave me a warning for it, that, even though I didn't mean any harm, it came across as arrogant, as if I was a better writer than they were.

It turned out that that person was friends with the people at Rhet Askew, and when they found out that I was in an anthology, they said that they wanted me to be removed.

They were reluctant to do it, so then she made up some stuff about me, and, long story short, I was removed.

It was shocking to me and I asked why. I was told that, according to the contract I signed that I had to remain a member of Writers Unite in order to join the anthology, and that, by banning me from Writers Unite, it banned me from the anthology.

There was no rule that they couldn't ban me from the Facebook group because of someone else.

I tried to petition to be let back in, asking all of the admins, but most of them just blocked me without answering any questions. Finally, I got a response, and they told me, very clearly, that it was because I had autism.

Wow.

I mean, who knows if that was the real reason, but that was what they said. Their justification for abhorrent, unjustifiable, impossibly bad treatment, was that I had autism, and that made it okay.

Now, the Realm of Mystery was supposed to be released last October but it is now 6 months past its deadline and as far as I can tell it hasn't been released, so who knows what they are doing with it. My concern was that they might use my 6 stories and put someone else's name on it.

Before they banned me, I had happened to talk to someone who invited me to join a horror anthology called The Book of Solomon. I decided that I wasn't interested, and commented that I'd rather write about the most haunted place on earth, Karta: the island of the dead.

So then an anthology was created around Karta, which was called Abhorrence, created by Emily Piland, who promised to put me and my story on the front cover and all sorts of other promises that just sounded too good to be true - and also too good to ignore. So I signed a contract and agreed to do that one, and that one was meant to come out in December last year, but it was later pushed back to April this year and now it is October this year, and Emily gave control of it over to Hydra Productions, who then either cancelled it or kicked me out, I'm not sure, but either way they are not talking to me, and, since it was basically my anthology, I expect that it has been cancelled.

The reason to mention this is because, after I was kicked out of Realm of Mystery, I told Emily, and she told me that one of her friends, Angela Kay, was organising a mystery anthology called Cold Cases, and maybe my 6 stories, or at least some of them, could be included there.

Angela Kay's publishing company was called Stained Glass Publishing, and she wanted me to pay a "buy-in", which I had never done before, and have never done since. It was $15, which didn't seem too bad, and, since I was kind of desperate, I went along with it. The problem was that only 3 stories were allowed instead of 5, and they had to be cliffhangers. They also had to be as short as 1,000 words, while my stories were all either 2,000 or 5,000.

Cutting my stories down to size was difficult but not impossible but the harder thing was making them cliffhangers. Angela kept saying no to them.

Of my original 5, she only went past the title on 3, and then only looked at the synopsis of 2, and only accepted 1.

She accepted "The Iron Bar", one which was loosely based on a real case. I later was able to get "When The Spooks Were Spooked" to be considered, after it was heavily modified, but I needed one more.

I eventually wrote one just for her, and they went with that one, now seeing that my other stories were completely wasted.

So I had my 3 and I had paid $15 and I still needed 2 more to complete the 5 that Harper Collins wanted. Mind you, I wasn't sure that they meant 5 stories or 5 books, and if 3 stories in 1 book counted as 3 or 1.

Then I was invited to join Worlds Apart at the last moment, so, counting the 3 for Cold Cases and the 1 (Karta) for Abhorrence, I had my 5 so I was happy, but it was a lot more work than if I had just gone with the Realm of Mystery. Angela was a lot fussier than Rhet Askew too.

Then at the last minute Angela asked me to write 3 more. I didn't have to pay a second entry fee, as she just wanted more stories. So 3 of the ones she had rejected were submitted, and there we go, I had 6 with Cold Cases to go with my 1 for Worlds Apart.

My one for Worlds Apart was a better story than even my best one for Cold Cases, but I was happy to have so many in there, and also proud when the cover was released and it happened to show my name at the start.

Apparently this is a better book than Worlds Apart, and it seems to be selling better. My father bought both and he told me that Cold Cases was a lot better, but that my stories were worse, which aligns with what my opinion of it was, which is good.

So that's the story of Cold Cases.

If you buy it, even on Kindle Unlimited, please give it a review, good or bad, but most importantly honest. It still doesn't have a review yet, almost 3 months after it was initially released on 25 January 2019.

I am proud to have been involved in this and relieved that it came out.

About Worlds Apart

This blog post is about my first ever book on Goodreads, Worlds Apart, which was released on 30 December 2018!

There is so much I could say about this, about why this was so important, and such a relief, but I will perhaps start with the book itself.

The book is an anthology, which, for people not familiar with the term, is a group of short stories on a particular topic or theme. In this case, the topic was that they were space science fiction stories, which had to end on cliffhangers. The rule stated that you could start on Earth but you had to end in space.

My story for this, "The Brooklyn Experiment", is based on something called a World Bridge, which was the earlier name for what we now call Wormholes. Set in 1937, it begins with Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen discussing applications of their Einstein/Rosen bridge theory, which sought to man-make World Bridges, which in turn was created based on the proof that natural World Bridges really do exist on Earth, especially in the Bermuda Triangle region.

The story is essentially about an expeditionary group who are sent through a World Bridge while it is located in the South Pacific (as it moves with respect to Earth), setting off from USA's closest base, Pearl Harbour in Hawai'i. With the tensions that would lead to World War II brewing, this was seen as one last effort to bring peace to the world and to prevent a war that could destroy all of humanity.

This is science fiction, in its purest form, not because it is set in space, but because it might be true. The definition of science fiction is not that it is futuristic nor that it is set in space - rather, it is something that might be true or might end up being true. In this case, I am dealing with some mysteries that have never been revealed. This could be entirely true, or at least mostly true.

I wish that I could tell you about the other stories, but I honestly can't because I haven't read them. Other people told me that my story was the best in the book, but they might have just said that because they were talking to me. It doesn't have any kind of a review, good or bad, honest or fake. It's been out for more than 3 months now, but for whatever reason nobody who has bought it has bothered to write a review.

As for my story, I have considered writing a longer version of it, that didn't end in space, at the very least continuing beyond the ending I have in Worlds Apart, but perhaps a lot more. I am yet to decide how big I want it to be or even for sure if I will do it. The copyright for Worlds Apart lasts for a year, and after that I can re-release The Brooklyn Experiment either on its own or as part of something more, perhaps in a collection of my own work.

So that's Worlds Apart. I hope that you like it, and, if you do read it, please leave a review, good or bad, and please be honest about whether you liked it. Thank you.

Adrian Meredith

Hi!

Hello Goodreads!

It's great to be here, as a Goodreads author. Wow! Who would have thought that when I signed up for that little anthology a few months ago that that would qualify me to be recognised for Goodreads.

So first off, identification.

In case anyone is confused, I am *NOT* the author of Concorde, in any of its versions. That's someone else. I've read Concorde and I liked it a lot, and I am happy for that to be associated with me but that is not mine.

My books are as follows:

(1) Worlds Apart (released 30 December 2018)
(2) Cold Cases (released 25 January 2019)
(3) Tales From The Aether (released 2 March 2019)

Notes:
* Worlds Apart and Cold Cases are both anthologies. I am one of 9 co-authors in each.
* Tales From The Aether was initially released as Bob the Potato and Other Stories, with its name changed after someone claimed that they couldn't tell that it was a collection, and hence were only judging it based on one story.

I have other works out there, but those 3 are the only ones currently on Goodreads.

I am currently contracted to:
* The Pinch Hitters (cricket and football writing)
* Witching Hour Press (upcoming book: Witching Hour: Zodiac)
* Cricdiss (inactive)

My first two releases were with Stained Glass Publishing, who also helped me with my third release, though that was technically self-published.

Anyway so now you know who is me and who is not me, hello!

I hope you like my works and I hope that you enjoy my blogs.

Adrian Meredith