Ten Greatest Dead Expat Writers

What is it about leaving the home of your birth and writing a book? The romance of new cultures? Cheaper living costs? bohemian sensibilities? Whatever it is moving away seems to remove writing blocks and sets an artist free. I've picked ten of my favorite expat authors who are no longer with us.





10) Although Joseph Conrad is considered one of the best English novelists he did not actually learn to speak English until he was 21. Conrad was born in Poland and orphaned at the age of 11. He joined the French merchant navy at 16 and spent much of his early years on the high seas. At many points in his life, he became involved in illegal activities (such as gunrunning) and was often embroiled in political intrigue.





9) George Orwell. Born in India and came of age as a young policeman in Burma. Down and out in Paris and London. George was often happiest away from home. A great writer and a great mind Orwell is also known as one of the greatest essayists of the twentieth century.





8) Vladimir Nabokov. Forced to flee the Bolshevik revolution Nabokov moved to Cambridge and then Berlin, and then Paris. As the Nazis moved in closer he jumped on a ship to the USA where he penned the classic Lolita. One of the great novelists of the 20th cent, Nabokov was an extraordinarily imaginative writer, often experimenting with the form of the novel. Although his works are frequently obscure and puzzling—filled with grotesque incidents, word games, and literary allusions





7) Henry Miller. The grumpy old man of letters found solace in Paris for ten years before retreating to his isolated Big Sur home. "All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without benefit of experience."





6) Graham Greene. Travelled to what he called the worlds wildest and most remote places before finally settling near Lake Geneva. His observations on south Esat Asia have only been matched by modern writers such as Christopher G. Moore.





5) Anthony Burgess. Taught English in a Malaya classroom where he penned his Asian trilogy before being shipped back to England with a suspected brain tumor where he wrote A Clockwork Orange, reviewed books, and became a celebrity.





4) William Burroughs. Shot his wife in Mexico and fled to Tangiers where he hit the pharmacia for synthetic dope and hammered out Naked Lunch in the Socco Chico before landing at the Beat Hotel Paris. In Paris the Olympia Press published the nightmarish visions that became a canon of the counter-culture 20th century revolution. He returned to the states a cult legend in his sixties.





3) James Joyce. Emigrated in his early twenties to Zurich, Austro-Hungry and then Paris. This modernist legend lived in self-imposed exile his entire life, yet strangely only wrote about his native Dublin.





2) Somerset Maugham. Highest paid author during the 1930s, Maugham travelled to the pacific islands to research his novel on artist Gauguin. Wrote of the isolation and madness of the British colonials in the Far East.





1)Ernest Hemingway. As a young man formed part of the Parisian Lost Generation. Nobel-prize winner and legendary author spent many months shooting game in Africa and his later days in Cuba. Hemingway was a true expat at heart and some would argue that his spare economic writing style is the greatest prose ever published.

Works in Progress

Rebel E Publishing have sent the contract and I've signed it electronically. The editors at Rebel seem lovely and reports from the authors are encouraging so it should be a good partnership. I'm looking forward to it's release in 2012.

Another little victory is the sale of my short story Two lumps and a pair of Glasses to Big Pulp Magazine. This will be my first publication in a USA trade print magazine. It was a crazy little story about a man with breasts who begs on the streets of Bangkok. I see him during my bus journey home from work each day. So many stories you can grab from the bus window in Bangkok. So many things going on all the time. Yep, and we are still not flooded at the moment. Well, not here, on my road, anyway.

I'm working on Black Jack thus far and I think I can finish the novel in first draft by the end of next week.(EDIT-NO YOU CAN"T! IT'S NEXT WEEK ALREADY - JN 11.11.11) It's my Jack the Ripper book. The one I've been working on for two years. Just worked out how it all falls together.

Bangkok Floods

Bangkok citizens were told to evacuate the city some days ago. Some people, including myself, have stayed. Here we are looking around at all the dry ground and thinking 'where is the evidence?', 'Where's this great flood?' The truth is some of the city, in the west has began to go under due to rising rivers / canals. When the flood comes it will come fast. One minute you're pointing at a small trickle of water and laughing at the great flood and the next you're up to your neck in it. If Bangkok barriers begin to fail (which may or may not happen) the northern section of the city will become inundated and STILL people like us south of the city will look around our little world and say, 'where is the great flood?' - Well, we might soon find out.

This could be human nature. In psychology, denial is a subconscious defense mechanism characterized by refusal to acknowledge painful realities, thoughts, or feelings. But where to go? It seems that the whole of Bangkok are evacuating to beach resorts and surrounding towns. Finding a hotel room for a large family is a nightmare, and then there's the actual travel part. Heavy traffic, roads being blasted apart to allow water to hopefully flow away from the city. Flooded roads traveling with kids (my youngest 5 year old can't swim!) Perhaps we're safer at home on the first floor where we have moved all our possesions. We are a couple of metres above ground here. Maybe camp out hoping the city will win its fight against this mass body of water and rising tides. Maybe not. Should we stay or should we go?

Stories are filtering through blogs and forums and newsrooms. One expat thought he was safe in the Northern city of Chiang Mai back at the end of September... His neighbours were being told that the water was incoming and he looked for all of the reasons to leave the city and couldn't find any. There was no flood outside the window. Dry as a bone. His house and his business ended up being flooded by 1.8 meters of dirty diseased water. He was stranded on the second floor of his office building for almost a week with just enough food, water, and at times without electricity. Then there was the story on Thai TV about the old lady trapped in her Auythaya home for days. Up to her neck in dirty water the shack-of-a-dwelling becamce infested with snakes. And what about the hundreds that have already lost they lives already in the floods? This is a serious matter.

The prudent advice is to pay heed to the government warnings, think worst case, and evacuate... once the water hits, our options are considerably reduced. The reality is that here in Bangkok we have an ocean of water above us and, any breach in flood defenses, physics takes over and water level inside the city will find equilibrium with levels outside of the barriers. The whole city will become flooded.

Thailand has taken a national holiday to allow people to escape. Shops are running out of basics like water, rice, dried noodles. Many rich Bangkokians panic-bought hording masses of essentials before fleeing the city. Stories of Hi-So Bangkok women with pocket-sized dogs and designer hand-bags checking into Pattaya bordellos keep us smiling. But the trouble is supply lines are not making it through to supply the major food-chains. Supprisingly the local markets still have all the basic things and vegtables and meat easy to find in the markets. I guess The High Society don't shop at the markets.

The next high-tide is this evening between 5-6pm. This is the time when it'll be most likely that the Chao Phraya bursts her banks. Its probably best to leave whilst we still have the choice.

Snake Man

Dean Ripa was born in 1957 in Wilmington, North Carolina. A herpetological-wunderkind, he was already catching dangerously venomous snakes before the age of ten in the swamplands near his home. At age 13 he was seriously bitten, and hospitalized in intensive care for 2 weeks, losing the functional use of his right hand for over two years. Undaunted, he continued, and by age 15 was already keeping some the world’s most dangerous snakes, king cobras, Gaboon vipers, black mambas, and many others, unbeknownst to his parents, in cages hidden in the attic rooms of their spacious mansion-like house. In his early twenties, he left for Africa to capture and export live snakes back to America. As this proved successful, he began traveling the world, becoming what was probably the first international snake hunter for hire. Major zoos, laboratories, and private fanciers were his customers. Long before television snake-wranglers were staging “cobra captures” in front of camera crews, Dean Ripa was prowling the remotest areas of the earth, far from medical help and human settlement, catching deadly creature and bringing them back alive to America in order to study their habits in captivity. His adventures have taken him to five continents and more than 30 countries, and they have sometimes been harrowing. He has been wracked by malaria, schistosomiasis and dysentery, lost in Amazonian jungles, stranded in the New Guinea highlands, and held up at gun point during military coups in West Africa and Suriname. He has survived twelve venomous snakebites to date, including seven by bushmasters, surely the record number of envenomations by this deadly snake on any individual.The literary magazine, Oxford American, ran an award-winning feature on his life’s work. As author William S. Burroughs described him in his book, The Western Lands, “Dean Ripa could have stepped from the pages of a novel by Joseph Conrad.”

Fried Fiction

The Boy That Played Chequers was inspired by a lucid dream. Almost wet. Earth (that's the name of the chequered boy) reaches nirvana during a game of chequers and disappears from his American homestay to form a religious cult in the Thai jungle. I went wild with it. Joe Dylan from Bangkok Express and Fun City investigates. He finds a community of naked utiopians in the Thai jungle. It's like The Beach on acid. And white whiskey. I wrote the first few chapters and posted an excerpt on the excellent Writers Beat website. Readers at that site kindly nominated it for the writer's choice quartly award. It came second. My second nomination to come, ahem, second.

David Wallace, writer, kindly offered these words.

"Excellent! probably the best piece I've read on the forum, don't hang about posting this get to it man I really think you've got something here. Get it finished, send me a copy and get it submitted."


Hmmm, ego not in check; I decided to, as he suggested, keep writing. The book wrote itself. I was sharp at the time. Off the sauce. Wrote a milllion words in 2010. Most of it published, for better or worse. Mostly worse. Submitted the piece to Silkworm press in Thailand who politely reclined. Thais are very polite about rejection. Cloaks and daggars. Mostly daggars. Never the one to feel the sting of rejection. Much. I sent the first thousand words to Fried Fiction. They accepted the first chapter and paid twenty-five dollars to publish it as a seralization. I'll spend that money on nuts for my squirrel. Not so needy now, am I Mr Acorn tree?

Thanks to David at Fried Fiction for his support. I really believe in this book. You can find the first part of the story by logging onto fried fiction.com.

Cheers.

Kurt Vonnegut's eight rules for writing fiction

Eight rules for writing fiction:

1.Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2.Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3.Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4.Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.

5.Start as close to the end as possible.

6.Be a sadist. Now matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7.Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8.Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

I'll add my own one - If you have an internet conncection where you write, your output will suffer