What Premise?

I love history. I have been a very lucky man who has travelled to 28 countries - and I mean traipsing through the countryside and not doing the custom bus tours with the guide announcing the next destination from the front of the bus.

In the army, there never was a tour guide - just the get out there and stop the enemy!

So when I chose to start writing, I knew three things

1. It would be located in places I knew very well,
2. It would be based on facts or unsolved mysteries that puzzle most intelligent readers,
3. It would be exciting, entertaining and educational.

From my work in the Financial Services Industry, I knew that most of the world's population were not aware of the importance of strategic minerals.

They didn't know that the 'developed' nations had very few of the natural deposits of these critical minerals. They didn't know that many political decisions were made because of these minerals (if you include oil in this category - some people are getting the idea) and they didn't know that the countries that had these minerals had the most turbulent histories because of the interference or enslavement by the 'developed' nations.

South Africa, Congo, Bolivia, Zambia, Mozambique, Angola, Russia, Peru - and the list goes on. What do they have in common? Strategic minerals.

USA, Britain, France, Italy, Germany, etc. - what do they not have? Strategic Minerals. Yet these were the great colonists - I know America claims to never have had colonies, but they have enjoyed the same powers as the colonial powers and invaded more countries than anyother nation in the twentieth century (that's a fact if you want to research it - 89 invasions in 100 years).

So I decided to write a novel about controlling strategic minerals. Sounds boring doesn't it?

Not if I weaved in the ancient Egyptians and Romans - I thought I would peak your interest.

So I used the Land of Punt - that fabled land in northern Somalia? Eritrea? Ethiopia? Sudan? No one knows for sure. The records that we have indicate it's in the region.

The novel begins with the rediscovery of the ancient mines after the discovery of a previously unknown papyrus from the Petrie Museum.

Europe has a paucity of gold. The novel, based in 2043, projects that the world will return to the gold standard. Europe has little or no gold. In the 'good old days' their colonies had gold - but Spain, Portugal, Romania etc. have less than 1% of the world's gold.

Therefore, Eurpoe needs to find the Land of Punt and to acquire that gold if it's going to survive.

Simple and effective for an opening sequence.

What do you think?

Who would ever want to be a writer?

I love books. I have always viewed them with awe and wonder, if they transported me to new levels of entertainment, education orplaces I have never seen before.

Somewhere around the age of fourteen, I discovered that there were good books and bad books. Don't laugh - I believed that there was a giant editor who really checked the facts written into books until that day

That's until I read a book that said that my great grand monther's tribe ate roasted mango seeds. I laughed, wrote a letter to the publisher and never got a reply.

Then I learned the hard lessons about propaganda. That all media paints a portrait of the news to meet their advertisers and governments needs - whether it was the New York Times or Pravda or La Prensa or the International Tribune.

So now I read books with a jaundiced eye. I read them either for pure entertainment or love of the written word. I very rarely read them for information purposes unless I recognize the writer as an authority in their field.

So when I decided to attempt to writing novels, I wanted to ensue that the research was impeccable - no roaasted mango seeds, no government or cultural propaganda.

The odds are that this may ensure that none of the novels will ever be published since they don't meet the current views in the United States or Europe - be that as it may, they will be accurate (laugh)

Next: What premise?