Janapar’s Release Date (And How To Jump The Queue)

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Yesterday morning I sat down in front of my laptop and went on an adventure.

Sunset over Ashlack

I went first to Turkey via the whole of Europe, across which I hitch-hiked in a couple of seconds.

Just as well, really, that I could barely recall the terrifying ride with an Azeri in a BMW into Istanbul. But I did remember the friendly sight of barbed-wire and sentry-towers that welcomed me into Syria.

By coffee-time, I had dredged up the weeks I spent cycling feverishly through a wet Levantine winter, compressed them into a couple of paragraphs, and transcribed myself moaning into a video camera on the edge of the desert between Homs and Tadmur, editing the transcript for clarity as I did so.

After lunch, I blasted my way across Jordan, stopping briefly to describe an injured camel and some curiously-shaped clouds, and then camped on a hillside near Aqaba before leaping the Red Sea and winding up somewhere remote on the Sinai peninsular.

There, I realised, an Egyptian night-watchman had taught me something I wouldn’t identify until four years later in front of my laptop. And, after a lot of experimentation, I found a way of rendering the lesson in a form that I found satisfactory.

Then I had dinner.

Just another day, really, in the life of an author-to-be: exhausting, frustrating and stressful. But there isn’t long to go.

Janapar will be released at 9am on Tuesday 27th November

I am so, so happy to be able to announce this today. The DVD master was signed off last night, and Janapar has finally been committed to manufacture!

James and I will be launching an online store at janapar.com at 9am on Tuesday 27th November. I’ll be cycling between my little flat and the local post-office with your orders until December 19th (the UK cut-off for Christmas delivery) before taking a well-earned break for the festive period. I’ve got my spiked tyres ready, just in case…

(If you haven’t already joined my mailing list, do so now to ensure that you don’t miss this window. I’ll also send you a discount code which you’re welcome to share around. It’ll work right up until December 19th, and you’ll be able to use it to pre-order the book too.)

Kickstarter: 8 days to go – and what a response!

I posted a slightly risqué thank-you video last week for helping me to meet my target on Kickstarter in an astonishing six days. In case you missed it, I’m running a crowdfunding campaign to fund the completion of the book of Janapar. I’m thrilled to say that the pledged funds have since risen to 114% of the total, and we’ve been picked out and featured on Kickstarter’s very own blog!

Kickstarter Screenshot

With 8 days left on the clock, we’re already fully-funded — fantastic proof of the crowdfunding concept. 261 investors will be getting their promised copies of the DVD and book as a first priority.

If you haven’t yet got involved in this, there are 8 days left to do so. The difference in cost between pledging towards the campaign and holding out for the official release will be negligible, but pledging will guarantee that your copies are in the very first batch that goes out. We’ll use the additional pledges to fund elements of the process that we left out of the original budget.

The campaign has been a great success, and I’ll be posting a behind-the-scenes write-up of the process in the very near future, in the hope that it’ll be useful to others looking to ‘kickstart’ their own creative projects.

Camping in the Sinai

Now: where was I? Ah yes – the Sinai peninsular of Egypt…