Posting on someone’s website is a real honor. It is like cooking in someone else’s restaurant, or painting on someone’s canvas and I will bear in mind to drop the horsing I usually do when writing on my own website. Every website has its own perks, and I guess the readers of mine like the horsing which I alternate with giving away secret insights just to make sure they’ll put up with it.

I met Susanne for the first time when I was looking for an editor for my dystopian novel which has been three years in the making. A friend recommended me to look at her website, and I love it, not the least because she made everything sound easy. She has this aura of reliability and trustworthiness that was soothing. That was three months ago, and everything my guts told me about Susanne came true. My book ‘Presage’ is now finished and available at Amazon. Not only that, but she has invited me to for this guest post.

There is a story to this novel which I had to write and get off my chest. One day, a friend sent me J.G. Ballard’s book ‘Kingdom Come’ in a brown paper bag. To send an anti-consumerism novel to a retail space architect –which was my day job at the time– was very ‘him’. “Consume with Gusto,” he wrote. I did more than that. The effect of hedonism and materialism of a mindless consumption-led society was not new to me, but in the novel, Ballard turned it into a silent evil that lurked under the surface and consumed our souls reducing us to hypnotized animalistic creatures without identities who moved and acted violently in mobs. It changed my perspective on my job, but I also felt that Ballard’s message was not complete. It was like a locomotive: once rolling, more and more cars tagged on. I needed to bring order to my numerous thoughts about this subject or justify the reason I was part of the whole machinery and I started to write to free myself from the grip of circumstances. The paradox of the free market’s current growth model is that it’s depleting the earth’s resources, fouling up our air and waters and putting more money in the pocket of the 1% rather the people who need it and whose consumer power will keep the economy going. Come 2018, in the world I describe in ‘Presage’, things will have aggravated, tension would have run up higher as the apocalypse will loom larger causing severe reforms to be put in place like the scores and mindroids which will reignite our compassion and reinstate the civility that we once had before free market advocates told everyone ‘greed is good.’ The question is whether it is too late.

That was nearly four years ago. I am no longer working as a retail mall designer. Instead, I teach architectural design and write in my spare time. Self- Publishing is now so easy that Amazon is accused of driving the little publishers out of business, but the paradox is that the easier it is to learn, the more difficult it is master and stand-out for both amateurs and professionals. It’s like singing, all you have to do is open your mouth, but whether you have a happy audience is a different matter. And unlike blogging, which is inexpensive, publishing a book can be an expensive learning curve especially if you have the full range of things done professionally, the cover, the trailer, the marketing, the list goes on and on. There’s three ways to go about it, learn to do it all yourself is number one. Number two is to have lots of friends so you can exchange favors for each other and the third option would be to learn promote it so your sales can cover it all… I’m going for the last one as you may have noticed and Susanne is a god-send whose help I cannot do without. Thank you Susanne!

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