Like all brilliant ideas it was simple.
Knowledge is power. So, mused journalist Mark Ulyseas, share it via an online cultural journal that everyone may read.
And this is how Live Encounters - Free Online Magazine from Village Earth first hit the virtual newsstands in January 2010.
Then Ulyseas came up with another wheeze:
With immaculate timing - and extraordinary good luck - on 30 April 2011, he blogged a fake final interview with Al Qaeda leader, Osama Bin Laden barely hours before the terrorist was truly assassinated by US Special Forces on 01-02 May in Abbottabad, Pakistan!
Then there were alcohol fuelled meetings with members of The Late Writers’ and Readers’ Festival, which if my memory serves me, is where Ulyseas and I first ‘met’ courtesy of the defunct My Telegraph blogging platform.
Then there was …
No matter!
Everyone’s real hero is Rainy, a handsome, loose-limbed street dog who one day loped into the writer’s home in Bali, Indonesia, refused to leave and has since advised – often chided – his beloved mate about domestic duties, a shared dizzying and deeply sad romantic life - and a mutually acute understanding of being of “mixed breed. And it is this that drew us together to become fellow travellers” confesses Ulyseas in the preface to Rainy – My Friend and Philosopher**.
The author describes himself as a ‘travelling writer’ and this book, together with Seductive Avatars of Maya – Anthology of Dystopian Lives** and In Gethsemane: Transcripts of a Journey** reveals a deeply troubled and restive spirit who seeks kindred, wandering souls.
Several of the pieces in all three books will be familiar to Ulyseas’s many online fans. Some are shocking; more allow outsiders a glimpse into a world that may be ‘paradise but not utopia’ and still others start to explain the peculiar parallels and paradoxes where all religious rituals meet then scatter to the furthest corners of our planet: A truly metaphorical literary ‘Tower of Babel’, if I’ve ever ‘encountered’ one!
Mark Ulyseas’s magazine is where the world meets. So too, his three startling and most unsettling books.
** Rainy: My Friend & Philosopher is published by Notion Press on Kindle @ $2.99 and in paperback @ $8.99.
** Seductive Avatars of Maya: Anthology of Dystopian Lives is published by Notion Press on Kindle @ $2.99 and in paperback @ $9.99.
** In Gethsemane: Transcripts of a Journey is published by Notion Press on Kindle @ $2.99 and in paperback @ $10.99.
© Natalie Wood (12 August 2016)
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