Ambushed by MTV in Sao Paulo

Flying over the countryside north of Curitiba - the Serra do Mar's forested mountains look stunning, as do the series of rivers pouring their sediment-laden waters like opening fans into the ocean. In at least in one case after a very long isthmus parallel to the coast. At 7000 feet you can still make out white horses and the long sandy beaches. Sao Paolo is visible as a circular sprawl inland from a coastal conurbation; from above it is like a white inkblot. Coming nearer, the clusters of hundreds of skyscrapers seem puny in their pretence to be high, thin teeth bristling their serated edges at the clouds. We bank westwards of the city swooping down over a forested but well-occupied area to make a perfect landing.

The plane is late. At Sao Paulo airport there is chaos as people are leaving for a public holiday. By the time I get to the DCL office via bus ad taxi it is 1.30pm.

This is a company of about 40 employees and its own canteen. Otacilia greets me. Its very hot and humid. We have a late lunch after which she gets down to business. She asks me to list all my projects, which I do - about five of them. I give her the manuscript to We Can Improve and synopsis for The Moebius Trip. She is not interested in The Drowning because it is too local. A Hybrids comic might work.

She shows me a huge cupboard of samples from the Bologna Bookfair she has to read, and manuscripts sent in. Then a box full of titles bought for the 2010 schedule. One of them is Exodus, an excellent novel for teens aout climate change from 2002 which I have recently read as preparation for writing The Drowning.

I'm introduced to the team including the deputy director, Mr Maia Jr. His office is also drab, with bare walls. We are in a light industrial part of town. Otacilia works long hours as well as having a freelance job and doing voluntary work teaching English literacy to adults.

She explains how the publishing process works in this state. Print runs are low - about 3000 - unless there is a government intervention, where the state decides to bankroll a 50,000 print run for direct donation to schools. Next year it's focussing on teens so I'm in with a chance there. But whereas HarperCollins will decide in months if a title is to make it, and provide marketing support for just one month when the title comes out, here a title is given two years to build. They still don't have sals figures for Hibridos. Sales channels are mostly direct sales, to schools and door to door. 30% of a print run, a staggering number, is given away to teachers, who read them and discuss them befor deciding wether or not to place an order. So it will be a while before they know how to proceed with Hybrids two. I complain that by that time the ideas in the book may have passed their zeitgeisty sell-by date or the readership of the first book may have out-grown it and not be interested in the sequel.

That's how we leave it until the following week when I get back from wherever Im going for my out-of -the-city break. Still haven't decided where. Was going to be Rio but no-one's responded to requests for meeting and anyway it's a yet another city. Otacilia suggests Paraty, where every year there's another bookfair, FLIP, a coastal unspoilt old town. A small place with beaches watersports, old buildings and nearby contryside. Sounds perfect.

At the hotel which the university has booked and paid for by Avenida Paulista they tell me that the booking was for two days including the previous night (I never asked for this but it's nice of thwm to think of it). As I didn't show up the previous night the whole booking is cancelled and I will have to re-book for tonight. I tell them there is no way I will accept this as a room has aleady ben paid for and it is immoral for them to accept payment twice for the same room. The receptionist says he will talk to the manager but takes my credit card number anyway.

By this tme there is only twenty minutes for me to briefy check emails and shower before heading off. There's an email from Gil at the uni about MTV wanting to interview me, but I don't pay it much mind, it sounds a bit crazy. Why would they be interested in me? Diego had said he might meet me at the hotel a 6.15 to go to the uni together but he doesn't show by 6,30 so I take a taxi on my own.

The uni is lively and buzzing. Thiago greets me and takes me up to the lecture hall. There's the professor Gil a fit, sotcky indian looking guy, with muscles and very relaxed in jeans and t-shirt. He's very happy to see me. Diego it seems missed me at the hotel held up by the dreadful traffic. He arrives half an hour later.

To my surprise there is the MTV crew. Caza, the presenter / director in a black t-shirt and heaavily-tattooed arms, and a three-person crew. He wants to do it now before my talk. While they're setting up he runs through the questions from his Blackberry. What about Hybrids, politics, how is Brazil going, what should young people be thiking, am I optimistic about the future, what do I think of cyberpunk. Suddenly everyone is talking about cyberpunk. It seems this is the take on Hybrids and it's a cool subject here. To me, that wave is well over. Gibson's Neuromancer came out in '79, thirty years back, another era. Still if that's how they latch onto it.... for them this is the zeitgeist. It's their developmental stage. We joke about what they'd merge with, the cameraman with his huge cam on his shoulder would have probems getting comfortable in bed. He tells me he interviwed the Super Furry Animals from Swansea once and how he liked their Welsh in which they'd discuss how they'd answer the questions before saying them in their lovely (his word) version of English.

I find that the way I answer the questions on camera is instinctively very different to how I talked on camera at Aymara. This is curious. For MTV I am speaking very fast in bursts of animation and a much younger style. For Aymara I was more serious and formal. In both cases my sentences are long and structured, but the style for MTV is more throwawy. I do this without thinking.

And now, as I begin my talk for the students, with the crew gone a few minutes later, I have another style. There are about 50 of them, all but four are women. It occurs to me dimly that as this course is about creativity, start-ups and digital technology this might be the main reason why I've been invited, but I don't care. I speak in English of course. There's no translator but Gil assures me they all know English. Some if not all are 'mature' students but I am by far the oldest person in the room. One beautiful woman in particular is eyeing me and smiling and seemngly nodding in agreement at everything I'm saying. I give them the schpiel about the size of the threat and how busiesses will be sustainable or fail. I sumamrise all the usual stuff - resource efficiency and closed loops, CSR and industrial symbiosis and run briefly through the opportunities for low carbon goods and services. Isn't this why I'm here? There's a lot of interest but not too much feedback. I'm told later they probably got about 50% of it. Then Gil says he wants me to talk about Hybrids. I so I do but not a lot. It gradually sinks in that this may be why I'm invited but I don't care, I'm a green evangelist, this stuff is more important than the products of own imagination. And everyone is pleased. One girl, Lilandra, has brought a copy of Hibridos for me to sign.

Afterwards, a small meal and a few beers, but all the women have melted way, it's just Diego, Gil and a keen young blogger with an iPhone, who pelts me wih questions and gives me a lift back to the hotel afterwords. I still don't exactly know what I'm doing tomorrow.

Rich pickings

Going home time from St Paul's School, Sao Paulo

You can tell the nannies because they wear a uniform of white slacks and tops and contain a high proportion of indigenous Indian or African slave-descendant genes. The mothers breeze by in designer jewellery and the overall atmosphere is tense. One of them, clad in a flowing leopardskin print robe slit high up to the thigh and of fairly mature years, totters by on her high heels having presumably already partaken of several caipirinhas this afternoon. This is the national drink, consisting of fermented cane sugar juice mixed with mashed lemon and more sugar and crushed ice - rocket fuel, broadly indistinguishable from the fermented cane sugar bio ethanol they put into their cars. In my bag is a kit for making it, a leaving present from the school.

You would expect mothers collecting children from school to be overall a pleasant experience. Half the people here have their ears glued to mobile phones. Most of them seem stressed. They are watched by men in black suits and shades standing arms crossed on the sidelines. All of them have memories of kidnappings. A kiosk run by another man with darker skin sells popcorn, pop drinks and ice lollies on the sidewalk while the nannies or mothers tow kids towards a never-ending parade of chauffeur-driven 4x4's or land cruisers, all obeying Henry Ford's mantra: any shade as long as it's grey, silver or black, and the windows are smoked.

The queue of vehicles is maybe half a mile along and conducted through a parody of suburbia in the shadow of walls topped with razor wire and electrified fences, bristling with security cameras, the sidewalks dotted every 200 metres with kiosks populated by security guards, paid by a collective of all residents and operating a secret code of whistles; which they displayed last night when I walked through the estate back from the town centre, inadvertently straying into this area. The whistles transmit down the line the nature of this unusual pedestrian, a rare species of invader, this time quite harmless.

It's warm and muggy and to this northerner it seems an incongruous time to be seeing Santa Claus, fairy lights and snowmen materialising on the streets as Christmas approaches.

This is my final day in São Paulo, at least until later next week and I have finished work. Later, I sip a beer outside a bar on Rua Joao Cachoeira. On the other side of the road the same migrant family in the same disused shop front that was there a week ago when I watched some official taking their details. More darker skinned people, mostly children, ignored by the thronging crowds on the streets. One of the boys changes his shirt from a wheelie suitcase. Their clothes at least seem quite new.

Smokers are few, and so are the smiles. I'm glad I'm leaving tomorrow.

Hanging out in Sao Paulo

It rained last night and today is much cooler and overcast. A relief from the last week. People here in São Paulo work very hard and long hours and I have found that an arrangement to meet is liable to be cancelled at the last minute for one reason or another.

Mind you, it's not as hard as trying to get a cup of tea which is in fact impossible. And of course I'm dying for a cup of tea.

At a restaurant yesterday with my DCL editor Oticilia in the Museum of Modern Art I asked for tea. I was brought a cabinet containing perhaps 30 different kinds - but I searched through them in vain - they were all fruit teas. No cafe or restaurant will serve tea! Arghh!


Today in a supermarket I finally found a packet of English breakfast tea. Heaven! However the price - five pounds for a small packet - made me think well, perhaps the Brazilians are right to drink so much coffee after all. And they do drink a lot of it -- many small cups of super-concentrated espresso.

Another thing you can't get is an up-to-date English language newspaper - or the American and English ones when they finally arrived two or three days out of date. Why do they bother in the age of the Internet?

Otacilia had cancelled two possible appointments before we met yesterday. But we had a beautiful day going to the Botanical Gardens Parque Ibirapuera and drinking coconut milk from the green fruit through a straw. I encountered for the first time a lates tree, its huge dripping roots like Rasta dreadlocks. The gallery had an excellent exhibition of non-Brazilian artists influenced by Brazilian art, including a Welsh artist, Wyn Evans. I particularly liked Mateo Lopez' lace-like map cut-outs, Simon Evans, Marjetica Potrc and Franz Ackermann.










In the early evening yesterday I found myself at an opening party for a new venue for a school for comics artists, Impacto Quadrinhos (Quadrinhos is Portuguese for comics). Luke Ross, a local (he anglicised his name for the sake of his career) who is successful illustrating many marvel comics, was giving a workshop. He is an old friend of the artist I am working with, Felipe Cunha, who introduced me to him.

He seemed very happy with the way Marvel were treating him. Me, I'm still waiting for a copy of the compilation of Captain Britain stories, containing my work, which was published in the summer. This is the second compilation - I never got the first either. Nor have I been paid a penny.

The owner of Impacto Quadrinhos, Klebs Junior, used to work for Marvel himself and still does occasionally. He told me he lamented the fact that Brazil still doesn't have a market that can accept home-grown comics with a Brazilian theme and all of the artists that he represents as an agent have to sell their work in North America or possibly Japan.

It was somebody's birthday so we went to a bar off Avenida Paulista, the commercial centre of São Paulo. We stayed there for several hours drinking iced beer and eating polenta chips. Felipe had told me the other night that it might be possible to sell a 12 page story to Heavy Metal magazine. I had sent him on Friday a story set in the story world of Hybrids, but with Major Winter of the Jean Police as the central character. All of the characters from Hybrids appear in this story which could be the first of a series and is aimed at a more adult audience. At the bar we discussed this and Felipe really likes it. Now I have to add some dialogue.

It's great that I finally have time to write fiction and have started work on my next novel The Drowning, by starting to write out the scene cards. Quite frankly I'd rather sit in the hotel and do this then go out and exploring São Paulo, traffic filled street after street after street after street of charmless buildings. It feels more like a cosmopolitan European city rather than a developing country.

My laundry has got lost. Eleanor, from St Paul's School where I am teaching from tomorrow, said she would do my laundry for me as it would cost a fortune to let the hotel do it. I had to take it to the school yesterday but she wasn't there and Rita, the woman who met us at the airport, stashed it in an office. Eleanor came over today to the hotel to see Katy and I. Katy Moran is the other author from Britain who is teaching in the School's. She didn't know anything about the laundry being left there. I only hope I can get it back, clean, before tomorrow!

São Paulo - city with a future

The chocolate is melting and so am I. It is 34° and I am sitting beside a small pool on the roof of the 27th floor of my hotel. As far as I can see in almost every direction are buildings: a crenellation of 10s of thousands of high-rises. Their rooftops map an archipelago of suntrapping eyries, many of them inviting landing spots for helicopters.

São Paulo is a city with a future, confident of its ability to be the capitalist Mecca of the South American continent. Its infrastructure creaks under the strain of its 10s of millions of inhabitants, but its optimism propels it to meet and exceed expectations during the 2016 Olympics when the world's eyes will be on Brazil.

As we crawl along its sclerotic arteries driven by taxi drivers who can't read maps and rely on us, strangers, to give directions in their own city we witness a bank robbery, street urchins and rubbish recyclers pushing their carts alongside splendid temples to the banking system.

Brazil knows crises and thrives on them so, unaffected by the recession gripping the rest of the world, its burgeoning young population demanded the baubles that have satiated and bored the dwindling young population of the North.

At Frankfurt, my lovely Brazilian editor Otaclia - of the Brazilian edition of Hybrids - reports that she was was doing more deals than anyone from a northern publisher. The children of the huge middle class of Brazil need literature, and if publishers can't buy it from Europe or America they will buy it from India and China. The balance of power in the publishing houses of the world has shifted. American comics publishers seek Brazilian artists for their energy and hard work. Brought up on a diet of both Japanese manga and Marvel, they look both ways. There are more Japanese people in São Paulo than there are in the whole of Japan I was told. Can this be true? It's big enough.

The children are astonishing. St Nicholas British school in Sao Paolo has to be one of the best schools I have ever been to. English is a second language, but at all ages they are highly motivated and must be among the brightest kids on the planet for their age.

They ought to be - the school is well resourced and costs £1000 a month to attend. These sons and daughters of bankers and multinational executives are of many nationalities - Europeans, Japanese, Vietnamese, Thai, Jewish, South African, Brazilian, with a few Indian, Muslim and the odd descendant of African slaves. The small campus crawls with security guards and technical staff who in radio contact with each other, shepherding students across the public road and into buses and cars.

The threat of kidnap and ransoming is high.

Greater Sao Paolo is reputedly the third largest city in the world: 30,000 sq km of buildings, with about 10% of the 20 million population living in makeshift favelas. But this area is one of gated communities, choked by jams of the latest models of cars, stress-fueled horns blaring in rush-hour.

I am running workshops on story-telling, journalism, and my own work, and when I give them exercises the students all complete them perfectly in good time - show me this in a UK schools, apart from the odd academy school.

Looking at their work books I notice immediately that teachers correct their English - grammar and spelling - in every case; something considered discouraging in UK education, but which I consider vitally important. If children are not taught these things how can they be equipped to be fully articulate? Is the language not the blood of a culture? Infected by misuse can it flow smoothly?

Next week I am in another school - St Paul's. This will be larger, and I look forward to seeing how different it will be. Otacilia promises to take me to a 'normal' school for comparison. The wonderful Otaclia promises me many things: guided tours, a party, introductions to environmentalists trying to make the world a better place, art galleries, and a publishing deal. In a couple of weeks we go to a bookfair together in Porto Alegre, where I am to give a talk on science fiction and surrealism. This is very exciting.

Having collaborated by e-mail for 18 months, I meet penciller/inker Felipe Cunha and his colourist George at my hotel for the first time. It's as if we have known each other for years. Over iced beers we discuss the challenge of surviving and succeeding in a city so huge you are less than nothing. Felipe lives two hours outside the city -- he came by bus, Metro and bus. Where his parents moved to 20 years ago was then trees. Now a favela has sprung up just five minutes away -- the rural desperate pursuing their own dreams to find themselves trapped in the double net of poverty and prejudice.

Over an excellent Italian meal the three of us plan escapades and promise to meet again on Friday night at a party at the city's best comics store, thankful, as everyone is, for whoever invented air-conditioning.

Environmental Homemaking - and Sao Paolo here I come!

I have just (Oct 29) sent off the manuscript to Environmental Home Refurbishment: The Earhscan Expert Guide to Retrofitting Homes for Efficiency, which will be published by Earthscan in June 2010. It will be published in hardback and is expected to cost £34.95. The draft cover design is right. Thanks to everyone who helped put it together!

I'm now preparing to go to Sao Paulo to deliver creative writing workshops in two schools, meet my Brazilian editor, Otacilia, for the first time, and Felipe, the comics artist I've been working with for over a year! Otacilia has promised parties, good food, fascinating peopple and a trip to talk and sign at the Porto Alegre bookfair on November 13. I feel very lucky!

I've also been working in October with Film 15 and animator Mikey Ford on the Animation Tank, with local primary school kids. They now know how important stories are - and have some great ones to turn into films in the next few months!