Thursday, May 30, 2013
Telling it how it is - Azimuth
A marketer said I should be more explicit about the story of the Azimuth Trilogy. Here's what I have written. It's now on the site.
A royal historian, Kamil, is called to the court of his emperor.
He is commissioned to write the history of a famous man, a magus, who lived many centuries before and
whose thoughts and deeds influenced all the major religions and moral practices
thereafter. The history is to help educate the willful teenage daughter of the
emperor, Sabiya. He writes the history and proceeds to read it to her. As he
does so he discovers that she is intelligent, provocative and manipulative. Not
only that but she realises that this plump, middle aged man has a forensic
brain and enlists his support in protecting her against her enemies, who would
either kill her or find the means to disinherit her.
So Azimuth consists of two parallel stories
like a double helix. The life adventures of the Magus represents one aspect of
every chapter and the doings of the court and Kamil’s entwinement in the world
of Sabiya, represents the other. The Magus’ story is told in separate
adventures, chapter by chapter and each is prefigured in sequence by the esoteric
major Arcana cards of the Tarot pack.
They, mysteriously, give some inkling of what is to follow but they are
cryptic and obscure. At the same
time, wrapped round these adventures or tales, the story of the court with its
intrigues, devilment, passions and bloody violence, maintains a tense narrative
that frames the historian’s readings.
Book
One: The
First Journey, begins with the Magus’ extraordinary, almost magical,
arrival in the world and follows his growing up and his discovery of his
talents, his relationship with his ‘foster’ father and his questioning of
everything around him including his heretical attitude to religions and their
gods. Each of his 22 adventures is like a short story, yet is linked to the
next. We see him grow, make mistakes, face great dangers, come upon worlds
peopled by extraordinary three dimensional characters and display a maturity of
thought far beyond his years. By the end of the book he is a powerful warrior
of a man, a sage in the making and his impact upon the lives and cultures of
those he has met is exceptional. Each story challenges the reader to think
about aspects of life and death, of love and of belief but never intrusively.
While these stories unroll, Kamil gradually
becomes embroiled in the machinations of the court and shows he is a dab hand
at solving murder and unraveling a scheming plot against Princess Sabiya’s
life. But will that be enough to save her?
Book
Two: The Second Journey, has 22 more tales, headed
by the same sequence of Tarot cards. This is the middle stage of the Magus’
life and encompasses what he became famed for. He is more of a sage, has
crystallized some of his thinking about the nature of existence but is faced by
the likelihood of a terrible war which will lay waste to the populations
of east and west. His journey to
resolve this awful, impending conflict is again broken into separate
adventures, linked and then fused as the book reaches its tense conclusion. All
the while the Tarot cards display more and more influence on events both within
the tales and outside them. And Kamil’s readings of the tales help to influence
Sabiya’s desperate fight to save her prospective empire.
As in Book One, Kamil’s life and power
within the court slowly grows. Princess Sabiya is now a young woman. She is to
become empress one day and is much sought after. There arrives in the court a
strange, malevolent Rasputin of a creature called The Red Man who seems bent on
the court’s destruction, as well as sullying Sabiya’s physical and emotional
world. Kamil may be her only defence against the man’s hypnotic, rapacious
powers. All the while, Kamil’s own life undergoes change, much of it
orchestrated by Sabiya, herself, who has taken an interest in changing him from
a ‘dry old historian’ into a social, attractive man of the court.
Finally we arrive at Book Three: The Final Journey. This is the final phase of the
Magus’ life. He is recognized everywhere for his power and authority, his
wisdom and central philosophy. He is now known as The Magus. There are 22 more
chapters but the tales are now melded into a flowing narrative as the Magus
journeys with a man of extreme evil to discover the secret of immortality.
There are still tales within the overall tale, bloody adventures and disturbing
conflicts, as good and evil edge towards a climactic and utterly unexpected conclusion.
Who will be victor? Who will gain immortality?
This part of the history of the Magus is
read by an older, wiser Kamil to Sabiya’s daughter, Shahrazad. Sabiya is now empress
and commissions Kamil to write a third book about the Magus and to read it to
her daughter. Again, Kamil is
faced with protecting a willful, manipulative late adolescent girl who is at
least the equal of her powerful mother in bending fate to her will. But here,
instead of threats to the court, he is drawn into the mystery of Shahrazad’s
very being and her desire to discover her blood roots. Kamil and Shahrazad
embark on adventures that vie with those of the Magus himself in their
mysterious, almost magical nature and their chilling danger. Tarot cards occupy their lives even more, though
their profound messages are often difficult to interpret until after events have
taken place.
And thus The Azimuth Trilogy comes to a
close, two narratives ending in the last chapter, each with a conclusion that is
spellbinding and unforeseen.
For more on The Azimuth Trilogy go to: www.azimuthtrilogy.com
For other fiction plus #free books go to: www.chronometerpublications.me
For tweets go to @profjacksanger
Monday, May 27, 2013
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Bare
faced liars
I watched a programme made for the telly about
the Dark Ages and how light they actually were. This one focused on
Christianity in the first 400 years after the supposed birth of Christ. It
examined the art of that period. For three hundred years there were no
depictions of Christ at all, only ciphers, codes, anagrams. Then there emerged
the first portraits. Since there is nothing in the New Testaments to guide the
artists, no lean-jawed, steely-eyed, hippy peace-lover, they did exactly what
games programmers do today and sketched the ideal. For them it was a beardless
youth, androgynously breasty and sweet of lip. Christ was both male and female.
He carried a magic wand with which he did tricks called miracles. Like computer programmers they had cast around for useful prototypes, the
bisexual equivalent of a Lara Croft or a shoot-em-up platoon leader. They found
it in Roman art. Apollo was ideal. Blonde and curly haired, appealing like
David Bowie to both sexes. The suggestion made in the programme was that there
were no female figures to idolise in Christianity at the time. Then along came depictions
of the Marys, the virgin mother and Magdalene the lover (eventually twisted into a new shape and
vilified as a prostitute). Now that the female aspect was clarified the artists
and the aggressively developing Christian church could look to the Roman God Zeus
for new inspiration. Bearded, mature, a powerful leader, lord of all he surveyed. What
better image for their proselytizing?
What an archetype! It has lasted a couple of millennia. Christians the
world over, black, white and every colour in between, regardless of the place
of beard and hair in their cultures, venerate this ubiquitous image of the hairy saviour.
Advertising is a powerful tool if you get
the symbolic essence right.
www.chronometerpublications.me
for free novellas and other books to buy
www.azimuthtrilogy.com
for the best of all worlds where the invention of a sage is highly visual!
Labels: Christ unbearded. The early Christian art of advertising.
Sunday, May 26, 2013
For
Queen and Country
A soldier dies in London, hacked to pieces
by two extremists. It is horrific. It is in broad daylight. The killers display
a crazed imperturbability to the hand held cameras of ordinary passers-by. A
woman bravely accosts them. Police arrive and shoot and injure them before they
themselves are attacked. The media circus follows. The soldier’s family are put
on camera in their desperate grief. Every news broadcast takes the viewer to
the growing mounds of flowers and tributes. Politicians talk of terror. Low-tech
attacks like these cannot be prevented. We are all in danger. We should be
afraid. Now the Home Secretary wants to reintroduce a snoopers’ charter which
will enable everyone to be watched, followed, have his or her privacy
undermined. The dead man fought for Queen and country in one of the most
unpopular wars imaginable. Britain is in Afghanistan supporting its corrupt
government. Britain is in Iraq where the toppling of a tyrant has led to
vicious tribal war and the disintegration of its society because Britain and
its allies did nothing about ensuring peaceful transition after the dictator
died, having first supplied it with arms like most countries in the war torn
Middle East. The death of the soldier helps the government. Cameron talks about
the country being stronger for the murder, united against terrorism. He can
project himself as the resolute leader. Still the media roll the images. The
dead soldier’s town. The priest at his memorial service talking about the local
lad who fought for Queen and country and who died on the streets outside his
barracks. The poor man suffered his death in the worst circumstances imaginable
but it was never going to be a personal tragedy. It was going to become
something else, a cynical opportunity to raise a population’s defiance, an
opportunity to divert their thoughts from the dead soldier’s fellow men and
women who are being killed overseas every day in wars that could never be won
and where the civilians' obscene death toll continually mounts. An opportunity for
manipulation. An opportunity to rewrite history, gloss it over, emphasise what
a democratic country Britain is and how just, therefore, must be its overseas
campaigns. An opportunity to get people onside. To induce support for the military. To deflect focus away from the political establishment.
www.chronometerpublications.me
www.azimuthtrilogy.com
Thursday, May 16, 2013
Writing
“A Woman Who Kills”
I’m about half way through a final edit of A Woman Who Kills. It ended up being 230
pages rather than the fifty or so that I had imagined. (See last blog.)Having finished Azimuth, got it printed and then put on
every conceivable device platform, I wanted to keep writing but at a less
intense level. By this I mean that The
Azimuth Trilogy is deeply philosophical, a moral maze, a facing up to the
quandaries of this existence. It is not religious in the usual sense but deals
with spirituality as seen from a skeptic’s point of view. It is a big book. It
is my opus. It is what I wanted to write before I died. Now it exists in real
and virtual worlds. The reviews have been more than kind. Anyway, this preamble
was to explain my desire to write a few novellas. I wrote three in five months,
a science fiction called Future Imperfect,
a tale of facing death called The Sense
of Being Sinbad and a curious soft horror story called The Visionary. They have been (to my eyes anyway) hugely
successful. As I write, 167,000 pages have been viewed in three months. A
friend asked me what it was like to know that your words have been consumed by
so many people. Not quite like having sex with a stranger, I said, but a virtual me having sex with
virtual strangers. In other words it is a form of twice removed intimacy.
A
Woman Who Kills began as yet another, different
again, genre novella. I liked the idea of a challenge to live within the means
of a new set of expectations. But it grew. I liked the main character, Grace
Dart, who shares with the Magus of Azimuth
a certain amorality. The genre (if it is one - it is in film, of course) is
superhero or super-heroine. In this case I loved the whole Kate Beckinsdale,
Michelle Pfeiffer, Angelina Jolie package of the sexy woman who is more than an
equal of men, physically and the ballet of the choreographed action. The girl
in Hanna, the replicant women in Blade Runner also come to mind.
The challenge was not the gradual changes
in Grace’s character or evincing a dystopian Britain where the global collapse
of the internet brings the country to its knees but the action itself. Superheroes
have many battles, the genre demanding that they be against individuals, groups
and massed ranks of opponents. Making each bit of action different and full of
tension is mind stretching. I have had some compliments about the visual nature
of my writing and here I had to ‘see’ every tiny element of the big picture of
physical conflict. It’s been great!
www.chronometerpublications.me
(for free novellas)
Sunday, May 05, 2013
In with the new....
I started what I thought was a novella before Christmas, following the somewhat successful completion of three novellas which I offered free on my website and which have amassed nearly 150,000 pages viewed in just over two months. See them at: www.chronometerpublications.me
Like best laid plans in life, the novella has gone astray. 200 pages astray. The end is in sight for the first draft which I thought you might like to taste here. It is the first short chapter and exactly how it came out on the page. It's called A Woman Who Kills and is a take on superheroes, here set in a dystopian future where the internet has gone kaput.
Chapter One
She sat hunched with
her back against a broken dry stone wall on the hilltop of a bumpy ridge in the
Farmsteads. The bony line of uplands ran down most of the centre of the country
so she could see hundreds of square miles to the east and the same to the west,
sugared with frost. Not far away, its motor chugging on vegetable oils like a
steamroller, stood the camouflaged car. Built like a tank, every external
element of it was designed to withstand bomb and bullet. It had three rows of
seats, the central one for its cargo; the wealthiest of private passengers,
senior civil servants, gangland bosses and Cabinet Ministers. And her.
Far away, coming
out of the southeast, its fuselage flashing in the low winter sun, was an
armoured tank of a car with two motor cycle outriders moving in a shallow arc up
the escarpment towards her. Her mobile phone had sent her exact co-ordinates
towards it. The newly positioned tele-communications satellite was making work
that much easier for those with membership of its elite population of clients. Everywhere,
people had mothballed their once state of the art video-phones against the day
that prices dropped sufficiently for them to subscribe to the new network. For at
least another couple of years the devices would be worth next to nothing. There
was talk that Spacecell Inc., which had launched the satellite, was planning to
keep the new systems incompatible with the old.
She stood up from
her shelter, into the wind, its razor edge making her eyes water. Then she stepped
gingerly over the springy bog turf towards the meadow with its circle of
standing stones. The car drew to a halt fifty metres from the prehistoric site.
A tall man in a long black cashmere coat and balaclava climbed out. She pulled
a scarf around her nose and lower face and entered the circle. He came in from
the other side.
“Grace,” he acknowledged
with a moneyed accent.
“Sir,” she
greeted him in return, her tone light and amused at the lengths he went for secrecy.
“Are you well?”
“Fine.”
“No news from
your father?”
“No. None
expected.”
‘He was always a
reprobate. But we must be thankful that he and your mother produced you.”
“It was no
fluke.”
“Indeed. Your biography
confirms it. Time for the ultimate work now.”
“I am listening.”
“It’s all on here,”
he said, taking the drive from his pocket in a yellow, card envelope and
passing it over.
“I’ll take a look.”
“Good. Threat to Parliament.
Plots against our noble realm. The prevention of a meltdown of life as we know
it, eh? As if we hadn’t melted enough already. Nobody is exempt. Even me. ”
She laughed. “I hardly
know you, so that won’t be a problem. What about my relations with Bloque?”
“Maintain them as
normal. Bloque is especially interesting which is why I introduced you. He eats
too well for a Service Head. He will suggest you eliminate a retired she-hag.
Do so. She deserves retribution. But use his commission to seek out her
network. She is not far from the centre of my concerns.” The man turned away. Then he
looked back at her, offering a small metal badge stitched on to leather. “You
might need this from now on. You’re official. Show it sparingly.” He took a
pace away, “It’s good we could meet here. My first visit to Arbor Low. Gives a
bit of spice to our rendezvous. What do you think of its ambience?”
Grace stilled her
mind. She picked up a faint fizz of static. “It has presence.”
“Yes. Once the
communications satellite of its time. Ok Grace. You can go. I’ll meditate
awhile.”
Her last image as
she glanced over her shoulder was of him facing the keystone with its hole for
the winter solstice, arms crossed in front of his chest, palms on shoulders.
Everyone to his own.
www.chronometerpublications.me
www.azimuthtrilogy.com
Twitter: @profjacksanger
Labels: Superheroes. #Writing.