Kickstarter Funding

Atlantis Reborn is live on kickstarter! If you enjoyed/are enjoying the novel I would really appreciate it if you would consider supporting it into its publication phase. I have numerous limited edition rewards in place for those of you kind enough to make a pledge!
If you aren’t in a position or able to make a pledge I would be very grateful if you could consider posting this plea on facebook or twitter. Any kind of advertising would be amazing :)
Thank you so much to all of you who have helped me on my journey so far and I hope there will be much more to come!  
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/676865745/atlantis-reborn-an-archaeological-adventure-novel

PS – At the very least by logging in you can finally see what I look like. The obligatory cheesy video is up online – I apologise in advance :(

Wattpad Featured Work

A quick thank you to all those who have read my work. Yesterday Atlantis Reborn held the number one spot in both the Adventure and Mystery / Thriller categories for the first time. I appreciate all your support in helping me to achieve this goal.
http://www.wattpad.com/user/mhj873

Mysterious 10,000-year-old ruins found in Syrian desert

I love these stories - Whether you are a sceptic or not they are always an enjoyable read. Might even make it into my next book! As an update, I have found an editor and am hoping that 'Atlantis Reborn' will be published in the new year. If I have the rights I will try and post a few chapters on here. In the meantime you can find it on http://www.authonomy.com/. Thank you so much for your continued support.

Archaeologist Robert Mason spoke at the Semitic Museum about the discovery of mysterious rock formations near the Syrian monastery Deir Mar Musa (above), and the need for further exploration. (Harvard / Jon Chase)

"A mystery city lies in Syria’s deserts, one older than the pyramids -- but the war-torn area is preventing archaeologists from decoding its riddles.
Fragments of stone tools, stone circles and lines on the ground, and even evidence of tombs appear to lie in the desert near the ancient monastery of Deir Mar Musa, 50 miles north of Damascus, archaeologist Robert Mason of the Royal Ontario Museum said. He likened the formations to “Syria’s Stonehenge.”
“What it looked like was a landscape for the dead and not for the living,” Mason said Wednesday during a presentation at Harvard University’s Semitic Museum, according to the University publication the Harvard Gazette.
He made the find during a 2009 trip and is eager to return and further explore the site. But he says regional conflicts make such a return trip nearly impossible.
“It’s something that needs more work and I don’t know if that’s ever going to happen.”

'What it looked like was a landscape for the dead and not for the living.'

- Archaeologist Robert Mason

The monastery itself, also called the Monastery of Saint Moses the Abyssinian, was built in the late 4th or early 5th century, he said, and contains several frescoes from the 11th and 12th century depicting Christian saints and Judgment Day. He told the audience at Harvard that he believes it was originally a Roman watchtower, partially destroyed by an earthquake and rebuilt.
But the desert puzzle is much older.
Bits of tools Mason found nearby suggest the mystery he discovered in the desert is much older than the monastery. It may date to the Neolithic Period or early Bronze Age, 6,000 to 10,000 years ago, the Gazette said.
Egypt’s oldest pyramid, the Great Pyramid of Giza, was built about 4,500 years ago.
Mason also saw corral-like stone formations called “desert kites,” which would have been used to trap gazelles and other animals. The desert around the monastery is hardly a verdant pasture -- “very scenic, if you like rocks,” Mason reportedly said -- but was probably greener a few millennia ago, the archaeologist explained.
Like Indiana Jones exploring Italy’s museums in “The Last Crusade,” Mason hopes to return to the monastery to excavate under the church’s main altar -- he believes he’ll find an entrance to underground tombs there.
He also hopes to return to strange stone formations he found in the desert, which he dubbed “Syria’s Stonehenge.”

The Real Big Brother... You are being watched.

I just read this post which, if i'm honest, is not an entirely unexpected revelation. I'm actually surprised that the US haven't already got something like this up and running. I guess the moral now is quite simply, beware, everything you do on the internet is being monitored; whatever you think or believe, nothing is private.  

Just off Beef Hollow Road, less than a mile from brethren headquarters, thousands of hard-hatted construction workers in sweat-soaked T-shirts are laying the groundwork for the newcomers’ own temple and archive, a massive complex so large that it necessitated expanding the town’s boundaries. Once built, it will be more than five times the size of the US Capitol.

Rather than Bibles, prophets, and worshippers, this temple will be filled with servers, computer intelligence experts, and armed guards. And instead of listening for words flowing down from heaven, these newcomers will be secretly capturing, storing, and analyzing vast quantities of words and images hurtling through the world’s telecommunications networks. In the little town of Bluffdale, Big Love and Big Brother have become uneasy neighbours.

Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.

But “this is more than just a data center,” says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle—financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications—will be heavily encrypted. According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”

Nineteenth century woman spotted with iPhone 4!

 

I just saw this photo (said to have been taken in the 1870s) on http://www.forgetomori.com/. How on earth has she managed to get hold of the iPhone 4??? I want one!

Apparently verified as genuine and not a photoshop job, a few people have already been jumping up and down on the web screaming time traveller. As a sceptic I believe it’s more likely to be the result of a dark room trick to get rid of any shadows cast by her hand on her face.

However, I’m open to a debate if anyone thinks strongly enough to disagree…   

Writing Conspiracy Fiction – A few ideas and tips for struggling authors

I have had a few people ask me how I motivate myself to write about what I do and secondly to provide them with a couple of tips and an idea of the potential pitfalls. Rather than responding individually I thought it might help if I did it via my blog. So in the spirit of cliché here are my top hints and tips:

1.      The starting point for me is passion. If you are not passionate about your material it will quickly show up in your writing. I love this genre because it throws up so many strong and contrasting opinions. Whether people think you’re crazy or have a point everyone has an opinion. From an author’s point of view, it helps to have a balanced view of your subject even if you are convinced the other side of the argument is balderdash. So whether its fake moon landings or lost civilisations that float your boat make sure you know your stuff before you start.

2.      That brings me on to point two, research. Even if you think you know your topic there will always be something you haven’t heard of. A new theory; a new take on an old theory; or perhaps even new evidence. Make sure you keep up to date with the news coming out and any relevant websites. For me www.AboveTopSecret.com is a good place to start.

3.      Write a brief plan. I hate plans personally, I think sometimes they can do more harm than good and more often than not lead to our old friend writer’s block at some point during the creative process. I am more in the mould of starting each chapter with no idea of what is about to happen and just letting my imagination guide me through. That said I usually have a vague idea of my direction, even if it’s only a line or two. Tom disturbs the burglar and discovers an ancient symbol tattooed on his neck etc. The same is true for the overall plan, I only started with a few notes expanding upon the theories I wanted to include; at that point I had no idea where they would take me. Even the characters were pretty fluid. I started with 3 core players and ended up with a cast of about 20!

4.      Be flexible and don’t be afraid to hit the delete button. Fairly easy in theory but you try deleting a couple of thousand words of text that you have spent hours trying to hone. Unfortunately you have to be brutal, if something clearly isn’t working or takes the book in a direction you don’t want to go just delete it. The same applies once you start getting people to read your work; if a few people mention the same passage as not working make sure you re-visit it and try and look at it from the point of view of a reader. If it’s clunky, rewrite it. If it still doesn’t work delete it and try again.

5.      You need a thick skin. My work is on a couple of review sites (http://www.youwriteon.com/ and www.authonomy.com) and it is tough to take when you get a bad review. When I first submitted work I admit (now) that it was pretty rubbish. My style was more akin to an exercise in creative writing at school rather than the punchy style required by the commercial world. The best bit of advice I received was ‘if it doesn’t take the story forward get rid of it.’ A week later and the first 3 chapters of my book were 4000 words lighter. You will always get bad reviews, just try and take the positives and leave any vitriol where it should be, in the bin.

6.      Write every day. You must set aside time to actually write. Whether its two hours a day or two thousand words a day you need some kind of structure to your project. Unfortunately without structure, the human mind can be a very lazy organ.  It’s too easy to say ‘I’ll do extra tomorrow’ or ‘I’m not in the mood now.’ You need to ignore these feelings and remain disciplined; too many books lie unfinished in drawers around the country. Don’t let your manuscript join that list. It may help to give yourself an incentive; write 1000 words and you get a cup of tea or a biscuit etc. Believe or not it does work.

7.      Get some good friends. A couple of good proofreaders are always a boon! You have to make sure they are literate in the first place though…

8.      Never lose your focus. The route to publication is a tough process (I know as I’m frantically swimming upstream at the moment) but you have to believe that it will happen in the end. If you don’t believe in either yourself or your work then why the hell should anyone else!

Good luck and I hope that helps and hasn’t distracted you from actually writing something! Thank you all for your continued support.

A Spanish Atlantis?

Can you see two rectangular structures in this satellite image? Could they be temples from Atlantis? (Image: Rainer Kühne)

The fabled lost city of Atlantis may lie in a salt marsh region off Spain's southern coast, according to a German researcher, Rainer Kühne.

Kühne has embarked upon a quest to uncover the location of Atlantis using a variety of satellite images. He believes that the structures he has found closely match Plato’s descriptions of the fabled city. His report describes two rectangular buildings hidden in a muddy region known as Marisma de Hinojos, near the port of Cadiz. This is an area of Spain said to have been destroyed by floods between 800 and 500 BC. Kühne is hanging his theory on the fact that the rectangular features appear to match temple depictions in Plato's dialogues Critias and Timaios.

"These rectangular structures are surrounded by concentric circles. This agrees with Plato's description that the temples were surrounded by concentric circles of water and earth. Even the sizes are correct. According to Plato, the diameter of the largest circle was 27 stades, ie 5 kilometers. In the satellite photos, the diameter of the largest circle is between five and six kilometres,"

Plato states that the Atlantean citadel could be found about nine kilometres from the sea on the edge of a rectangular plain surrounded by mountains that reached to the sea. Apart from this plain he described the country as mountainous with a steep coastline.
"Near Cadiz there is a rectangular, smooth and even plain which lies at a south coast. It is the plain south-west of Seville through which the Guadalquivir [river] flows," Kühne said.
If true the mountains described by Plato would then equate to the Sierra Morena and Sierra Nevada.

Plato’s work also includes a description of a war between Atlantis and the eastern Mediterranean countries. Kühne believes that this may be a reference to a group known as the Sea People around 1200 BC.
"If the capital of Atlantis indeed existed near the mouth of the Guadalquivir, then we suggest that Plato's Atlantis tale is based upon an Egyptian report on the Sea Peoples and some Greek tradition on the Athens of that time."

“The report on the Atlantean city and state may refer to a Spanish city, possibly identical with Tartessos, which was probably destroyed by Carthaginians during the 6th century BC," Kühne said.

So has Kühne solved the puzzle of Plato’s Atlantis? Or is this another case of merely selecting the aspects of Plato’s work that seems to fit and wedging it into something akin to a coherent theory? The biggest elephant in the room perhaps being that the timings are approximately 10,000 years out. I know the usual retort when the evidence doesn’t fit is that Plato was wrong and many of the ‘facts’ came straight from his imagination but I’m not so sure. Although I concede that Plato may have muddled his history somewhat in parts, the comet strike in the Hudson Bay that hit around 10,500 BC just seems too much of a coincidence to ignore...