Ukraine Story

What's going on in Ukraine is horrible. I feel it, because Ukraine is close to my heart. I lived there for three years. Three of the best years of my life. It's a beautiful country, filled with beautiful people, and when I was there it seemed to be edging its way out of hard times.
Now its right back amongst them, worse than ever.
It was so good that I wrote a book about it. A book that's set in the ex-patriate community of Kiev, asa well as small town England. It's mainly about the kind of people that cross these boundaries, and about the kind of people, and adventures, they find when they do so. There's also a bit of steroid addition, some EFL, and a lot of anxiety.
Unsurprisingly I used a pseudonym. It's not for children. Be warned.
Tomorrow, February 15th, and the day after it's free on Amazon.

2019 advetures, here... https://sxswx365.blogspot.com/

Ukraine 2014: Massive Dramatic Story, Good against Evil, Giant Super Hero takes on Grotesque Villain.

The bright colours and sunny pictures of my friends facebook profile pictures are disappearing. They are being eaten up and replaced, one by one, with this.

Nothing. Mourning. The long dark night before the dawn. My friends are Ukrainians, or people who, like me, have lived in Ukraine.

You didn't know that, did you?

I lived in Ukraine for three years. It's where I had my first proper job (the company sent somebody to the airport with a SIGN to pick me up). I had the first apartment all to myself (the windows were taped shut, and the water out the tap was hot enough to make coffee with). My first real relationship was in Kyiv. Ukraine is an awesome country. It is the biggest nation entirely within Europe. The people are spectacular. They party with a joy that is rarely seen, though their history is astonishingly harsh. One after another powerful neighbours have rampaged across their great expanses of undefendable, beautiful grassland. In the 1930s the Soviet Union engineered slaughter by starvation that saw corpses piled in the streets. 

Then there was Chernobyl.

It is that history, which gives authenticity to the other things that are so great about Ukraine. In the west are the mountains and forests of the Carpathians, haunted by wolves and bears. Lviv is an ancient city with hundreds-of-years old churches from a dozen different forms of Christianity, some of them rare, and tiny, and hailing from far away. 

In the east the steppes roll away towards the Caspian sea, much as they did when Cossacks galloped across them.

Kyiv, the capital, is a beautiful city, rolling over seven hills, from river beaches...

...to mysterious wooded graveyards that feel they are the edge of a 1000 acre forest. 

There are markets heaped with fruit, and a metro so deep the escalator takes 10 minutes to ride. In the winter it can be 20 below, in the summer people cram into beautiful parks, late into the evening. 

And now it is racked and ruined. You might have seen. I won’t go into the politics. You can find that elsewhere. All I want to say is that this is a beautiful, European capital, where young people are fighting for their futures.

Fortunately they’ve got this guy on their side, and he’s used to fighting. This is a time for heroes, and it may be that Ukraine has one.

The Black Square on people’s Facebook page was also the signature artwork of Kazimir Malevich, one of the founders of modern art, who was… drumroll… Ukrainian.

Not many people know that, much as they know little about Ukraine in general. It’s worth finding out, though. Much of this blog is about how YA paranormal and fantasy is not really that fantastic, because real life - if you are adventurous and look hard - is much more extraordinary. (examples here, here, here, and here) It is the fantastic things I have experienced in places like Ukraine that have informed my writing. 

It's worth finding out about Ukraine. I did, and I never looked back.

Ukraine, Travel Writing, and Secret identities

At the begining of the millenium I lived in Ukraine for four years. It's been a while, but I remember it perfectly.

 I remember very well the low-ceiling hall beneath Tolstova roundabout in Kyiv, accessed by subways from three main roads, that led to the metro station. Here, in the iron grip of winter, hundreds of people would gather to buy snacks and beers from stalls, smoke, listen to buskers, and even dance. When the thaw comes the crusts of filthy snow that line every road are ploughed into the middle of the street for cars to bump over and smash up.

In the summer, every beautiful, wrought iron bench in every park is full. The horse chestnuts on the main street in Kyiv flower, making it look as if the road is lined with beautiful candelabra. On Sundays the road is closed and people stroll along, dressed in their best. they drink beer, have their pictures taken with monkeys, and pay 10 cents to weigh themselves.

Hundreds of islands in the river, lined with beaches, become pleasure parks. Stalls and open air restaurants sell shashlik, delicious marinated pork kebabs.

When I got the job that took me to Ukraine, I didn't know where it was. Somewhere - roughly - between Japan and Germany. It turns out that Ukraine - as well as being the biggest country that is entirely within Europe, also holds the centre of Europe. It is a big, boisterous, beautiful, kind of backwards place, and I loved it.

I was always going to write about Ukraine, and now I finally have it makes sense that the hero is larger than life. Ukraine is also a very mysterious place, and sometimes adventurous, and so that's how I wrote the story.

These are both firsts for me, so I've started out with a short, 20,000 words, which has the lead, Ox Purcell, as a kind of metaphor for the country. Hopefully it's also quite funny.


As well as everything else, Ukraine is raw, unsanitised, and so the story is as well. For that reason I've used a pseudonym, and I've doubled down on the name of my main character, Ox Purcell.

This post is a tiny snapshot of the lifeof an observer  in Ukraine, if you want more, as well as mystery, comedy, and adventure, bad-language, and very bad behaviour, check out Weirdo Beach:  99cents only...