Confessions of a Technophobe, New Season 1
The first season of “Tech Wars” is finished until the completion of the ExoBrain Basic build, also known as Milestone 4. In the meantime, I’m reverting to my previous practice of writing whatever comes into my head on the day of writing it.
I’m currently preoccupied with two other writing projects. The first is the forthcoming publication of my third novel of the Willjohn Trilogy, Surviving Treachery, in October or November of this year. My first two novels, Pursuit of Treachery and Deceit of Treachery were very well received by those who have read them.
Part of the reviews I’ve received from the first novel read as follows:
“A gripping read that I highly recommend. Fascinating insight into the culture and history of South Africa which is inexorably woven into the book.”
“Exciting suspenseful novel set in South Africa. A succession of cliff-hangers drew me on from start to finish.”
“I enjoyed this book – kept me page-turning. Good plot and well written.”
“I loved this book so much that I could not put it down and read it from cover to cover in one sitting.”
Despite these encouraging comments, not many books have been sold. The simple reason being that the books have not been properly publicized. My publisher has done what she could, but hers is a very small organization and cannot afford a major publicity and marketing campaign. This is the plight of dozens of writers, good, bad or indifferent. However, I have been so encouraged by the reaction I’ve received that I’m in the process of trying to find the money with which to pay a professional publicist.
I’m writing about this because there are so many people who would love to write a novel but are intimidated by the perceived length of time it will take to actually write about 300 pages. If they get past that hurdle, the next worry is how to get it published; and, finally, if they do get it published, they need to make sure that enough people read their book to make it worthwhile.
I won’t even go into the joys of fighting your computer if you’re a technophobe like me. When you add this up, relatively few get to the far side – namely a successful novel, let alone a best seller!
Having battled through to the point where I have been published both in paperback as well as Amazon/Kindle, I’m determined to make my works well known. On one of my earlier blogs, I did write about how I got to write the books in the first place, but it bears repeating briefly because I learned so much from what happened.
• • •
As an established movie and television screenwriter in South Africa, in 2001 there was a paucity of work for me. At that stage the Internet was beginning to take hold. More and more people were finding ways to make money from it. So, I sat down one day and wondered how my writing skills could be applied to this new medium. At that stage I didn’t see a future in writing blogs, although there had been some amazing success stories in that area.
I came up with the idea of writing a weekly serial on an established website of some company or organization, so that people would return to that website over and over again. The more usual thing is to visit a website once, get the data you need and never go back to it, even though the company may put out data on new developments or new products. My thinking was that if there was a weekly dramatic fiction serial with a cliff-hanger at the end of each episode, readers would be drawn back to the website over and over again. The serial would only be accessible once the readers had looked at the home page and hopefully some product had caught their eye.
Now I had to find a client. After some false starts, I decided that a hotel would be a good option. A friend of mine had a brother who was the chef for a very well-established country hotel, Sparkling Waters some seventy miles from Johannesburg. I was put in touch with him and he in turn introduced me to the manager of the hotel. They had quite recently opened a website but were very disillusioned. It was the old story of putting something there that no one knew about – rather like the unknown novelist. They had only about 400 hits on the website a month and were thinking of closing it down. The manager and ultimately the owner of the hotel felt that my idea was worth a shot and commissioned me to write a story based on the actual hotel, some of its staff and even some of the more interesting characters that either stayed there or just frequented the bar.
I got permission to use actual names of places and people and soon discovered that there were some wonderful real characters to populate my fictional story with my fictional guys and girls. My rule was that any of the real characters were the good guys, and my fictional characters were a mix of the good guys, hero and heroine, etc., as well as some really bad guys with which to create an exciting story.
Within three months, the weekly visitors to the website had gone from 400 to 8,000. After that I lost track, but I understand the numbers climbed steadily. The management was delighted and eventually I was commissioned to write the serial for two years. Apart from the fictional story, I soon found a wealth of local material that wove neatly into the book. For example, a local farmer would come into the bar every day, drink two glasses of white wine and chat to anyone in the bar. I was introduced to him and soon found out that he was an amateur historian with a vast knowledge of the area. He was the great-great nephew of a famous Boer War general, Christiaan de Wet, and he was also one of most successful fruit farmers in the region, elements from both of which I used in the first novel.
• • •
Two major battles of the second Anglo-Boer War were fought in and above the valley where the hotel was now situated. The first, the battle of Buffelspoort, saw the Boers (Dutch name for farmers), who were running out of provisions and ammunition, ambush a British convoy of over a hundred wagons travelling from their major base in Pretoria to a garrison in the small town of Rustenburg, near the site of the Sparkling Waters hotel.
Prominent in the attack was a young commandant and future Prime Minister of South Africa, Jan Smuts, whose men managed to capture a number of the wagons and effectively keep the Boers fighting for several months. Eventually the sheer weight of the British forces, nearly half a million against somewhere between 30,000 and 60,000 Boers, overwhelmed the superb horsemen and marksmen. The second battle raged on and over the summit of the Magaliesberg mountains above the hotel site and again resulted in a decisive victory for the Boers.
In the novel, the major character, Ed Willjohn, an American mining engineer consulting with one of the nearby platinum mines, is staying at the hotel. He and the farmer start chatting and he is given the story of the battles as well as being taken to the actual sites where they took place. I was able therefore to include a lot of local color along with events that historically took place near the site of the hotel.
The area’s geological history is also interesting in that the Magaliesberg mountains are the second oldest mountain range on earth after the Himalayas, although far smaller in size. Millions of years ago a large inland body of water receded and left the richest source of platinum on the planet, just to the north of the mountains.
With this rich backdrop, creating an action-adventure romance was an exciting process. Unlike the times that I wrote movie or television screenplays, where I would spend weeks plotting and structuring the story as well as delving into the back story of the major characters, I never gave it much thought before sitting down to write. As a result, I often painted myself into a corner but had great fun getting out of it again. Basically, my whole approach to writing changed and I found that it improved my screenwriting as well.
A writer, or any artist for that matter, values recognition at least as highly as any financial rewards. The response to both my first and second novels has been enormously gratifying yet it is allied with the terrible frustration of knowing that only a handful of people even know my books exist. I intend changing that with the publicity, again not so much for the money but for the satisfaction of knowing that a decision I made – sixty-eight years ago on the edge of the Namib Desert to write a novel one day – has been achieved and recognized!
• • •
I believe that my third novel Surviving Treachery will be the best of the three. Ideally, if you want to read them, it would make sense to start with the first one. They are all stand-alone stories, however, featuring the same Willjohn family as well as different characters for each story.
By the way, writing this blog has been enormous fun and I’m thankful to those who have commented positively on it. In my next blog, I’d like to tell you something about the television series I am now writing, to be translated into Arabic for the Middle Eastern market.
I’m sure that Peter Warren and his team will experience as much or even greater satisfaction once the ExoBrain is launched. Long ago, I recognized that the creative process, although most recognizable in the arts, is part of any evolution towards making something new or better. ExoBrain will be recognized as being both new and better. What a wonderful expression of creativity!
An ExoTech Ltd shareholder, Chris is currently authoring two of the four books to be published the day ExoBrain launches and has helped to create ExoBrain’s introductory video to the Confidential Technical Briefing. Chris has spent his working life in the film and television industry, starting with BBC Television in London, then ATV in Birmingham becoming, at the time, the youngest Studio Manager in Britain.
Later, in South Africa, he wrote and directed film and TV commercials, having four South African entries at the Cannes Advertising Festival. After a number of years of writing and directing or producing documentaries (eight international awards) and corporate videos, he concentrated on writing feature film screenplays (five screened) and television series (seven screened). He has a novel, ”Pursuit of Treachery,” with a literary agent and is currently obtaining finance for an action adventure feature film he has written and is co-producing. He is a published poet and has given many readings.