Liam Howley's Blog

Siegfried Sassoon - Atrocities

Atrocities, Uncensored. Thanks to Crooked Timber.

The Absurd Demise of Poulnabrone Giveaway Offer

Hello, everyone!

This is just a short blog post to announce a giveaway with a difference. Up for grabs are three copies of The Absurd Demise of Poulnabrone, which of course everyone is welcome to enter.

But everyone who enters this giveaway can claim a prize. Once the three lucky winners have been announced, you can send me a private message with your name, email address and format choice (epub, mobi or pdf), to collect an ebook copy of The Absurd Demise of Poulnabrone.

This offer ends on midnight GMT, 15th July 2014. Good luck everyone.

Drumroll Please!!!!

And the new cover for The Absurd Demise of Poulnabrone is...

Dah dahhhh!!!



I hope you all like it :)

Liam

What’s It Worth To You? The Ebay Edition

    In Leaving Eden, I detailed the beginning of the odyssey that was the writing of The Absurd Demise of Poulnabrone. Upon leaving Eden, or in a less biblical sense, (but no less dramatic), Peru, I had arrived, with Ursula back in Ireland, to settle in, settle down and work on the next part of our lives. I had my tome to write and we both had to figure our place and our path through the world. How to support ourselves, how to lay down roots when you’ve presented yourself with a challenge?
    I, of course, was completely naive. Everyone who climbs a mountain for the first time, does so with an immense burst of optimism and a sense of strength, of character and will. How little would be done without that first thrilling sense of enthusiasm. I had earmarked six months. I would work nights in a quiet hostel, alone with my ideas, the computer screen, the pen and paper. For my part, I would provide alongside my wife, and also set my stall out for the future. I had pride.
    There are many great things about this modern age, not least the tools it provides for a whole host of projects and adventures. The computer on which I am writing this post is a case in point. Yet I found that the old fashioned way, of just scribbling in my notebook, would prove to be a great way to start, to find a point from which the words would well. The keyboard and screen would be the tools of a different method, the editing into existence of a page.
    Stories are not always fluid things. Sometimes they can run, river-like, helter-skelter. At other times they come in pieces, swirling about like some carousel of mind waiting for the music to stop. I would often write a piece and wonder. Where does this belong? Is it of itself, or just a part of something greater. Is the world I’m creating complete enough to offer place? A scene once written might not find itself used for some years, or it may be an immediate infusion, a vital source of fluids from which currents run.
    I would learn these things, these processes over time. I was also learning that what I had thought would be a simple project was anything but, and that the quiet hostel I would work in was quite large and active. There would be time to write, but it would not be a simple or smooth process. There were characters to deal with, events, disturbances, joys and frustrations.
    Some of the characters where immense. A lady, who lives in the hostel, is to this day an enigma to me. I was reading Kafka’s novels, The Castle, and, The Trial, and she was drilling into me the minutiae of her quandary with the European state of which she was from. Trials, judgments, personal vendettas, criminal acts, and all stemming from the simplest of bureaucratic decisions. I still can’t decide if she was truly persecuted or completely nuts, or even still if one doesn’t necessarily exclude the other, both persecuted and nuts; and that’s not to exclude the possibility that one may well preclude the other. What I do know is that she was very forceful in telling me of her struggles.
    Another was a writer of historical crime novels who I enjoyed engaging with, but had a bulletproof sense of self. I wish him well. There were students, actors, soon-to-be barristers, arriving and staying, some on and off, some for quite some time. From the lone individual to the well organized groups, visitors came from all over the world, each with their idiosyncrasies, often with their stereotypes, sometimes with habits that I hadn’t known of, and of which they themselves appeared unaware. A curious example of such, is the propensity of Germans to stand in doorways, and cluster in groups at the bottom of stairwells. I observed no-one else doing this with any frequency.
    Depending on the week or the arrangements set over an extended period, I would work three or four long nights a week. That Ursula, of course, worked in the daytime, presented me with a challenge. So every week, I would switch to the world of the living and back again, a feat the equivalent of doing a round-trip to the land down under. Fatigue is an old friend.
    Whilst doing this, I was also working on a play called The Widening Gyre. A series of monologues, I entered it into The Maguire International Playwright Competition of 2009. It got long-listed. I sent it to a number of theatres in Ireland. The national theatre The Abbey sent me a lengthy critique. I read it. I learned.
    It was whilst in the process of turning The Widening Gyre into a novel – renamed as Let All Lie With Her, and in need of a rewrite – that Ursula became pregnant. I was delighted. I had one of the most surreal drives to work when Knocked Up by The Kings of Leon was played on the radio. Everything at times appeared as if in a movie; Radiohead’s atmospheric In Rainbows, a stalwart soundtrack to my evening commute, would inevitably play Nude by the time I stopped at the lights of Tara Street bridge in Dublin city centre, the red neon of Kennedy’s pub casting a glow on the smokers at the door who were enjoying a puff and a chat. There’s a magic quality in such moments, when the world seems as a set, and your life a role in the unfolding narrative, witnessed by yourself from outside. A very post-modern rendering of an ancient tale.
    I was almost finished writing The Absurd Demise of Poulnabrone when my daughter was born. Almost, but not quite. I was three quarters of the way through the third draft and I was going to antenatal classes. We were in and out of the hospital – the pregnancy wasn’t smooth. By the time she was born, I’d had an hours sleep inside the previous two days. But then there she was, the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen, completely and utterly dependent, listening to me as I spoke in hushed tones whilst holding her by my shoulder. Life in such moments has meaning. It is a thing of itself. Ineffable.
    Everyone was fantastic. I’ve never come across such good will from people. My family were fantastic. My friends present. My employers and colleagues both excited and generous. Strangers we would randomly encounter would offer us support and advice in the most unexpected ways. Women, in particular, would appear as though from the woodwork. They had done so throughout the pregnancy, requesting to touch the bump, offering counsel as to the child’s gender by the roaming their hands to determine the shape, but they were ever more present with our newborn. I took a break, and took my long accumulated holidays so to spend time with my new family.
    I would spend the next year and a half finishing the novel and learning the skills necessary to be a publisher. I taught myself how to build a website using html5, css3, and then WordPress. I began learning php and javascript (curiosity made me do it the hard way). I became a Linux fan. I began using Scribus, an open source desktop publishing program, and Gimp, an open source image manipulation program. I picked up some typesetting techniques and began figuring out the cover. I read blogs and articles, figured the ins and outs of the self-publishing world. I wanted this to be good. To be professional. I’d put so much time and energy into the story, I didn’t wish for it to be let down at any stage.
    And so, a friend and colleague’s partner who works as a copy-editor took it on as a first project on a novel. Her name is Katie Cox. She did an excellent job. Any errors in the text are my own. I set up a business: Jagged C Press. Bought some ISBN’s. Dealt with Amazon and Kobo myself. Employed the ebookpartnership to deal with the rest. Established an account with Lightning Source, to create a print edition. I joined Goodreads.
    All of this takes time and energy. It takes a commitment, an investment that’s not merely emotional. It doesn’t just affect your own life, but also the lives of those you love. And they recognise that. They know there is an investment there for them also. They become your champions, telling everyone they know, reading. They’re happy for you. So, I bought a stock of a hundred books, thinking that it would be a good start, to have promotional material, something for the local stores, for friends and family.
    I soon found I couldn’t shift them. One local store took some copies, others used distributors as a shield. On a more personal level, I had friends that whilst expressing interest, were in some cases reluctant to even accept a copy as a gift. I found that people I had expected to not be interested were very much so, and vice-versa, but for the most part the indifference was profound.
    So, I let the book lie for a while, to see if it would find its own place. Unsurprisingly, nothing happened. Eventually, I turned to a good old fashioned book raffle. I would enter a Goodreads giveaway, and make the number large. The books were sitting in boxes taking up space in my small apartment. It was time to have them read, to get someone to at least tell me if it was any good. I’m not a forward person. I don’t like intruding on people. I don’t like a lot of what I see on Goodreads. So, I decided to let people read the book whilst I disengaged. I didn’t wish to be a presence whilst they were reading. I like honesty. I want people to feel free to tell me what they really think.
    It’s been a long journey to where I am now. There’s been high points and low moments, but in all that time, I’d never expected to see this…





So what’s it worth? I have had some great reviews. They’ve made me smile. And despite my pleasure that others are actually getting something from my work, I was always aware that I could get some bad reviews, and legitimately so. There’re all types of tastes in the world, and I’m not so arrogant as to shower myself in praise. We all have our blindspots and I don’t need delusions to be proud. Equally, I was aware that some would choose not to review, having little or nothing to say after reading. There are many books I have read that I have liked but felt no desire to review afterwards. That some would choose not to read it at all, I could even grudgingly accept, although I would wonder the motives for entering a book giveaway contest. But this, I was not expecting. That someone for a measly $6.50 would enter a giveaway, solely for the purpose of gaining that extra item to sell on Ebay. I guess for some people, there’s just no worth in anything at all. Thanks a lot sister!!! You’ve made my day.

Cesar Vallejo – The Complete Poetry

    On mother’s day, on the 30th March this year, a present arrived for me, from Ursula, my wife and mother of my child, that put my measly pretence of a gift in the shade. The Complete Poetry of César Vallejo, a Peruvian poet from the early 20th century, was the last thing I would have expected, for I was not only woefully ignorant of him, but could not recall having ever heard of him before. Being no expert in poetry, and in fact, being in the case of poetry quite a light reader, I would in most cases have just brushed this lack of knowledge off, settled down and, with a glass or two of whiskey, become acquainted. However, I soon discovered that this was no ordinary omission.

    “There are blows in life, so powerful… I don’t know!
    Blows as from the hatred of God; as if, facing them
    the undertow of everything suffered
    welled up in the soul… I don’t know!”

    From The Black Heralds, this opening stanza begins a collection of poetry that I cannot begin to describe, and yet that I have an overwhelming desire to share. I love words. I love the malleable mála of these arbitrary arrangements that can envelope you, mold you, wrap you in their labyrinthine passage or cut you open, tear your heart with slivers. The words I love reside at intersections, as frontiers in a changing landscape, insecure and fragile…
    How it is that a poem comes, I don’t know. I’ve written a few. Some I’ve parted with as gifts. Others I’ve stretched and bent and kneaded into shape so to fit my prose, or just simply discarded. How it is that Telluric and Magnetic came to be written, to …

    “… integrate with wind the lowings, the waters with their deaf antiquity”

    “Rain based on noon,
    under the tile roof where indefatigable
    altitude gnaws
    and the turtle dove cuts her trill in three!”

    “Just to have seen their corrosive dust!
    Just to have heard their oxides of the heights!
    Mouth wedges, mouth anvils, mouth apparatus (It is tremendous!)”

He was of his time. And his time was one of force and violence, of emergence, of making and remaking. Revolutions, ruptures, the rent faces of humanity split on altars.

    “Málaga without father or mother,
    nor pebble, nor oven, nor white dog!
    Málaga defenseless, where my death was born taking steps
    and my birth died of passion!
    Málaga walking behind your feet, in exodus,
    under evil, under cowardice, under the concave, inexpressible history,
    with the yolk in your hand: organic earth!
    And the white in your hair tips: the whole chaos!”

    I could continue quoting pieces from his poems, but I won’t. They don’t deserve to be nibbled but devoured. Instead I’ll leave you with this reading from Sam Shepard. Have a listen. This will grab your attention.

Leaving Eden

    In October of last year, and after almost six years of writing, and editing, and rewriting, The Absurd Demise of Poulnabrone was released to the world. In a process that was long and fulfilling, and rewarding, and circuitous, and frustrating and torturous, and (choose your superlative), I had finally cut the knot and cast it adrift.
    I’d begun writing in the latter months of my stay in the Peruvian rainforest. I’d been living there for almost two years, alongside my wife, Ursula, who had been the inaugural manager of Refugio Amazonas. In fact, only weeks after we married we moved to this remote building site, that required a half hour journey by road and three and half hours by boat from the nearest town of Puerto Maldonado. We were to live in a shack, with no running water or facilities, but with a team of workers, researchers, a host of laptops and a satellite dish! Washing was done with a bucket of cold water, or with a dip in the Rio Tambopata. This was the beginning, our Eden.
    Of life in the rainforest, one of the luxuries was the trails. The land we’d moved into had been a farmers land, the space where the lodge was to be built, surrounded by the forests in which the community had hunted for many, many years. Long thin trails to oxbow lakes and colpas were already cut, and with constant walking and an easily wielded machete they were kept clear of undergrowth. Once for hunting, they were now the viewing galleries of the forest, along which guides would lead visitors or which researchers would slowly saunter.
    Being a forester by education, I had first visited the rainforest as a volunteer for a research project. Returning to the rainforest, but with no purpose in hand had provided me with a challenge. Whilst most seek a sighting of birds and mammals, my joy is for the plants, the trees, the eco-physiological processes, the geography of the landscape, the dynamics of water and how it influences the forest structure, and how those birds and mammals, so prized, interact and shape that same forest. That’s not to say I didn’t seek or get a thrill upon seeing a tapir, or upon stumbling into the incredible gnashing, grunting, grinding sound, (and that’s not to forget the stench), of a herd of white lipped peccaries. But the one thing I wasn’t looking at was the influence of the forest on me.
    Falling asleep at night, with your window an open space to the forest, is to fall asleep to a cacophony of sounds and songs, and calls and whistles, so that it seems that the forest themes with life. And so it does. Yet, upon walking a trail, the only sound would often be that of alarm. You are seen, the caller is not. The forest is filled full of creatures whose primary defense is invisibility. A potoo could stand on a snag but a short distance away, and be virtually indistinguishable from its perch. A sloth has perfected the art of stillness to such a degree, that it is almost as immobile as the tree in which it lives. A praying mantis can look like just another leaf in a sea of leaves. They can be so difficult to detect that even when an experienced guide, or a local resident, points to the potoo or sloth or mantis, my first thought would sometimes be, “Are my eyes deceiving me?”
    We come – or at least most do – from cities, or even large towns. We come from road networks and highways, from a world of televisions and computers, from pressurized environments, be they work or home. We move with speed, chasing life, opportunities. Our senses are constantly gratified with ever changing stimuli. Don’t like this program; change the channel. Got nothing to do; turn on the gamebox. There’s no-one around; quick, check your phone. This is the world of the screen; the world of instant communication, instant information, instant relief from boredom, for the one rule of this world, is don’t be bored. Don’t ever be bored! But the rainforest is not of this modern world. The rainforest is primeval.
    It’s only when you’ve been bored for a while that you begin to see. Eyes may look out at the world, but its stillness that brings life to you. All about the world is being written, waiting to be read. It’s the book eschewed in favour of the soap, a kaleidoscope unseen for the melodrama of the mind is blinding.
    I grew up surrounded by books. They were my own. I was an Enid Blyton nut when I was a kid. I loved The Famous Five, and The Secret Seven. I read Roald Dahl, Tom McGaughran and oh so many others. My mother was wonderful. Not a reader herself, she would bring me to the library, or buy what I chose whenever a book fair was on in school. When a teenager, I became enthralled in fantasy. Upon entering my twenties, religious and philosophical wanderings grabbed my attention, popular science, poetry, Yeats, Walden, Emerson. I wanted to write. I scribbled. I wrote a large part of a fantasy novel – that is never to grace the light of day.
    My mother was also a keen gardener. Oh, she loved her garden! A friends father would bring us to Wicklow, the rolling slopes that lie south of Dublin with their majestic landscapes and wooded glens and ancient monasteries. And so, in my twenties, when I figured I had to do something with myself, I began with horticulture, and moved on to forestry. And one day, my professor, upon a field trip, after hitting one or two of us on the head with a thin, leaved branch (he had a playful way of making his point), told us to start reading. But he didn’t mean books. He meant the land. He meant the soil. It carries stories. It can tell you what it is, what has passed, what can be, if only it is read.
    It was in the rainforest that I began to read literature. Reading, it is often said, is dying out. Its the nature of the modern world that attention spans are shortened. It’s a boring activity. It takes too much time! Time, however, was what I had in abundance; time to walk, time to think, and time to read. My only limitation was that English language books were none too easy to find in Peru, so, for the most part, I relied on what kind hearted guests left behind. One such treasure was One Hundred Years of Solitude. And like many erstwhile writers before me, upon reading this masterpiece, I immediately picked up the pen.
    If books are born from books, then writing is born from reading, and literature wise, I had little to go by. I was in for an education. There are so many masterpieces in the world, works of outstanding value abound. My particular bent is for the poetic. I love well crafted prose. But equally, I love the originality of thought. And if I was looking for insight, the forest was my first muse. And yet, I didn’t write about the forest. I wrote about my home country. I created a tale about a fictional town, about Poulnabrone.
    I’ve been asked many times over the past few years about living in The Jungle. The surprising thing about it is the normalcy of it. It’s easy to pass this off as, “Sure, you can get used to living anywhere”, but whilst that is, for the most part, true, there is something else to the observation. One of the works I came across in my early twenties concerned a famous hypnotherapist, Milton Erickson. It took me some time to internalize it, but one of the basic techniques the practitioner had was to listen to the language of his patient. Everyday discourse is filled with pearls of observation. Language is rich. Layers and layers of meaning exist in even the most innocuous of expressions. We’re always speaking the truth.
    When I arrived in Peru, my home country was booming. And as in so many boom towns the language of finance and economics predominates. It is akin to a frenzy. News programs speak of house prices and the citizen gets replaced by the consumer. I was keenly attuned to this fact. The boom, is to say the least, now over, and the modern world is in a state of flux. This is one of those periods when the rate of change is so fast it has become chaotic. An economic order that is little short of plutocracy has developed. We are witnessing a quiet coup, but the boom, as with the bust was just a part of this process. The coup is an ongoing project. And it is a coup that has brought it’s own idioms.
    We have been here before. Upton Sinclair in writing of the meat industry in Chicago in the late 1800′s called his work, The Jungle. I had yet to read The Jungle at the time, but I was reading of ecological theories of community succession, and then later walking on a trail, not far from the lodge, when that phrase, the economic jungle, leapt to mind. Words used in economic theory suddenly gained a significance that they had not before. We call factories, plants. We speak of liquidity. Savings are called deposits. We speak of market porosity and depth as though they are soils. These words sprang at me from the page. I realised that economics is nothing but human ecology. It is the means through which we order our societies. Equally, however, it is a construct of the mind and a set of power relations.
    As the name suggests water is the predominant force in the rainforest. It is the medium of life. Living near a river bank not far from the Andes allowed me to see a river like I never had before. It is dramatic. Shallow streams in the dry season that run down through gravel beds can become immense bodies of water in the wet season. The rivers swell and rise and rise, and run over the floodplain, that riparian stretch of forest so diverse in species of plants and animals. It seeps into the soils which soak it up like a sponge. And then the water subsides. Until I had witnessed such an event I thought the river carved the forest, but that is not how it works at all. It bites at it, grips it at the roots and tears it away as it is leaving. It eats the soil in this manner. The trees fall shortly after.
    I didn’t see it then, but the time was coming when we would leave. Times were changing there as much as they were in my home country, and my eye had been turned to Ireland. I was in the forest, thinking of my home country. I knew the bust was coming. That it was crazy. A river of money flowing through shallow soils. It seemed absurd to me, that it wasn’t obvious to so many.
    I left the rainforest with all these thoughts in mind. I had the opening pages, which would in time be changed or turned into another part of the story, but more importantly I knew what it was I wanted to write and why. The how is why six years passed before I placed it in print. To be any good at anything requires doing. I needed to read, as much as to write. I needed to learn.
    Since I arrived back in Dublin, the bust has happened, and five more years have passed. Yet beneath it all, nothing much has changed. Same order, but with the water subsiding. Same old shenanigans, but with a whole new layer of spin and gloss. I live here now with my wife and daughter in this town I love. I read about it in foreign papers. Ireland is the poster child for the new economic order. A lot of truth and garbage passes for analysis. I find blogs are a better place to turn to if you want to know what’s really going on.
    I’d begun writing this with the intention of stating some sort of principles. What was the aim or even point of starting a blog, but well, leaving Eden proved far more interesting and what I wished to explore. This is what I will write. What comes to me. And right now that’s enough. So I’ll leave it at that…