Welcome - The International Writers Magazine - January Editorial 2011
*Due to a small donation we will continue on in a slightly smaller capacity for 2012.
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Happy New Year of the Dragon. May your hopes and dreams come true. I'm a contrarian. It means basically many people are expecting this to be a very bad year economically and politically and yes that might well be so, but individually people can have very good years in a dragon year and I'm kinda thinking that this will be one of those years. Thinking positively helps too. You can attract luck. Doesn't mean you'll win the lottery but on the other hand at least buy the odd ticket. Will let you know how it goes.

I suppose I ought to let someone else ring in 2012 with predictions that will most definitely turn out to be wrong. Then again I can be just as wrong as the next guy I guess. Life is changing so much around the world so quickly and there are are so many trouble spots, so many impending elections in major countries and minor - 2013 will start with a whole new set of people running the world - all of them no doubt full of ideas of how to put right all the stupid stuff that the previous lot set in motion. They will all most likely fail.

Ready for Ron Paul for President? Really? I'm all for honesty in politics but are you ready for that? Might be scarier than you think. Luckily it seems most Republicans are going for the most sane option in Mitt Romney but equally might go for the clearly insane Newt. What of the Marine Le Pen winning the election in France. It could happen. The French are very secretive and won't tell pollsters what they are thinking. Pandora's little box of tricks is out now. Extreme right and left will come to dominate politics as a direct result of the austerity we all must now face. And don't think China is going to be all rosy. You can't grow a country as fast as they have without massive financial strains and massive corruption - all of which will implode very soon as they too have a changing of the guard. A property crash in Shanghai and elsewhere could bring down their banks just as easily as ours.

The Year of the Dragon can be a very fraught year wreaking all kinds of changes and just as the Arab Spring brought in effect the law of unintended consequences - so might this Dragon.

Revolutions in the middle-east will produce new dictatorships - but this time fundementalist ones and women might lose out big time right across the region. There will be lamenting for the previous set of dictators. (But perhaps not in Libya or Syria). Can't be anyone who doesn't wish for democracy and peace in Syria but the regime seems to prefer to fight to the death. Question: Which country will take in Assad and his evil brother? Hand them over to the World Court guys, wash your hands of them.

Greece might be pushed out of the Euro and who knows a revolution might take hold with major unintended consequences for the region. If one goes, why not three, or four? There is too much fluidity to predict anything other than tomorrow is another day. By next December everyone will be obsessing about the Mayan calendar. (It's just a calendar - get over it the world isn't going to end. In fact it marks the end of somethign and the begining of something new in Mayan culture.) Unless Iran takes us all down first of course. They seem just crazy enough to want to do that and there's enough Republicans and Tea Party fanatics to take the bait. Want to escape it all? Going to get harder to find somewhere to go to that isn't in turmoil.

It's all so up in the air. If you seriously think you can predict the oil price, gold price or price of bread one month from now you are doing well. One year away - impossible. One year ago Japan thought it was going to have a good year in 2011. Fate can play horrible tricks. Japan is now recovering but those laws of unintended consequences meant that the important factories that made the bits that make the whole were all in Thailand, which had the worst floods for 100 years. Diversification and off shore factories have their problems too.

I am not going to predict anything except that I'll be another year older and no doubt deeper in debt. With luck I will have met some new friends and drunk a few good bottles of red on the way. Can one ask for anything more.

Right now I'm just going to think about writing (and procastinating).
Raymond Chandler gave good advice about writing:
“The important thing is that there should be a space of time, say four hours a day at least when a professional writer doesn’t do anything else but write. He doesn’t have to write, and if he doesn’t feel like it, he shouldn’t try. He can look out of the window, or stand on his head, or writhe on the floor. But he is not to do any other positive thing, not read, write letters, glance at magazines, or write checks. Write or nothing... There are two very simple rules, a: you don’t have to write, b: you can’t do anything else.”
______________________________________________________________________

© Sam North Jan 20th 2012
hackwriters (at) gmail.com
Editor – Hackwriters.com
Author of 'Diamonds - The Rush of '72'
The Fantastic True story of the 1872 Diamond Rush in the USA
'If you liked Butch & Sundance - you will love this' - Nick Strange
also available as an e-book on iTunes

Please note you can buy my Sherlock Holmes novel The Curse of the Nibelung as an e-book direct from iTunes now or from Barnes and Noble

Share |

Many thanks to all those who have contributed to this January edition from all over the world. Many thanks too to those who have bought my books recently (Discounts now available via Lulu). Another Place to Die has passed the 3020 figure now and that cheers me up and is now available as an e-book. Now if I could get Mean Tide or Diamonds to sell as well, I'd be really happy you can now download them as e-book on iTunes or Lulu.
* The good news is my Sherlock Holmes novel The Curse of the Nibelung is now available as an e-book on itunes. Download here or Here

Mean Tide by Sam North *Buy now and get 25% off (Now a Young Adult Mystery e-book) Mean Tide - a tale of spiritualism and a young boy's fascination with a murdered man. Lulu Press - ISBN: 978-1-4092-0354-4 http://www.lulu.com/product/ebook/mean-tide/15665337 Review: 'An engaging, unusual and completely engrossing read' - Beverly Birch author of 'Rift' His father has disappeared, his mother is sick. Oliver, recovering from chemo, is sent to live with his psychic Grandma by the river in Greenwich. Oliver quickly discovers he is living with a world of strange people. When he finds a dog with its throat cut on the riverside, everything changes. Oliver wants to find the people who did this terrible thing and discovers the terrible truth about himself.

The Curse of the Nibelung - A Sherlock Holmes Mystery by Sam North *Buy now and get 25% off e-book ISBN: 13: 978-1-4116-3748-1 302 pages - Lulu Press USA 'Chocolate will never be the same again' - Sunday Express Buy from your favourite on-line retailer * New revised ebook edition now available here - Amazon UK Amazon USA Barnes and Noble & Waterstones

• Back to Index

© Hackwriters.com 2000 - 2012 - Our Thirteenth year
We are Carbon Neutral

FICTION . TRAVEL . LIFESTYLES - REVIEWS