Quartermaine’s Books
This is my new YouTube channel, where I talk about writing, editing, publishing, printing and all things about books.
Quartermaine’s Books aims to give you an insight into the real-world challenges of writing based on my own experience.
I was taught to write professionally at The Economist (actually at the research part of the group, the Economist Intelligence Unit — EIU) after scraping a degree at Oxford, where writing two short essays a week for the eight-week terms was a challenge for a military man lucky enough to be sent there. Still, it was a discipline that laid the ground that the EIU polished into professional skills.
The main lesson was if you will be a writer, then WRITE. It’s not a dark art; sit down, bang something out. In those days, it was paper and pen with the copy sent to the typing pool, marked for corrections with an esoteric code, and edited by a manager. Nowadays, you can write anything you want almost anywhere online. Revel in it!
Write, and KEEP WRITING!
For fifty years, I’ve written memos, reports, and emails. I wrote an ‘EIU Special Report’ about the grain trade. My first book was a two-volume technical treatise on agricultural commodities, ‘Oilseeds, Oils and Fats: A Traders Manual’, published by the United Nations International Trade Centre in Geneva in (I think) 1990.
Covid changed what I write about. The paid consulting work dried up, but I’m a WRITER, so I have to write.
Stuck in my Bangkok apartment under lockdown, I started my first novel, ‘Gateway To Gandamak’. A totally different experience. Writing up technical research for a client is one thing; writing from a personal perspective is quite another. A different level of stress and much more emotion.
‘Gateway’ done and published, I found I had discovered a new way to write. My second book followed, ‘Rivers of Aid: Stories from the Poor Countries’. A third book, ‘Guardian of Kings’ (no link yet), is coming.
I’ve learned (and I’m learning) many more lessons than simply how to write in a different style. In some respects, the writing technique for book-length fiction is the easy part; the editing, cover design, and publishing are other worlds.
It’s this experience, learning as I go along, that I want to pass on via Quartermaine’s Books. The aim is to provide a new episode every week. Please check out the channel; if you enjoy it, please subscribe (free), make sure to click ‘notifications’ and give me some ‘likes’.
My books, ‘Gateway To Gandamak’ and ‘Rivers of Aid, Stories From the Poor Countries’, are available from Amazon Books on Kindle and in hardcopy. They appear under my pen name G.J Quartermaine, and are published in Asia by Precisely Company Limited and can be obtained on direct request to the publisher. Write to:
- seiya.bastin@precisely-asia.com, marked BOOK PURCHASE.
