N.G. Osborne's Blog

A reader emailed me tonight and asked the following:

“Is Elena gay? I thought she might be because of her strong feelings about Noor and her love for Charlie.”

I thought the answer deserved a post.

First off, Elma is one of the characters who’s changed most through the multiple drafts of the novel. She is also, in some ways, symbolic of how Charlie changed as the novel got rewritten.

In the very first draft, Charlie was more of a frat boy - he didn’t have that wounded backstory, a mother who’d died of cancer, a rift with his father, a deep but hidden intellectual side to him. He was purely in Pakistan to make money and have as much fun as he could. Elma was someone he hit on and slept with. She was a frivolous character in herself, a sexually liberated Dutch woman, and her purpose was to be someone Noor could encounter nude at Charlie’s home. Noor concludes that Charlie’s everything she hates about the West and Western men in particular.

In subsequent drafts while Charlie stayed the same, Elma graduated into a more layered individual. She still slept with Charlie early on, but she also fell in love with him. He made her feel alive I suppose. When Charlie subsequently dumped her, because he had fallen in love with Noor, she was deeply wounded and at the end of the film she does betray Noor out of jealousy and I suppose spite.

In the last few drafts, however, I shifted Charlie’s character. (Curiously enough Noor has never changed that much). I wanted him to be fun still but I wanted him to be more soulful, to have a deeper core than becomes more apparent as the novel progresses. I felt that the early affair with Elma tarnished him and so I got rid of it, but in doing so Elma needed a whole new role. It was then that I touched on the idea of not only making her Noor’s high up boss but also the person who proposed the scholarship to Noor. She and Charlie, in fact, have almost no contact in the story whatsoever anymore.

To me, Elma is a complex individual. First and foremost she is a career woman. Her career has come before everything and anything else, and when we meet her she is desperate to get on the next rung of the ladder - the UN post. That said there is also a part of her who wonders what’s it all been for. She’s in her late 30s, perhaps she’s broody, perhaps she is looking at her life and wondering what its exact meaning is. After all she got into the aid work for all the right reasons - she genuinely wanted to help people. Yet as she explains to Noor in the book, now she is a high level manager she has lost that one-on-one part of the job that makes you actually feel like you are making a difference. And so Noor becomes a project - something that, in a bizarrely self-centered way, can make her feel better about herself.

Now in terms of her sexuality, I would say that Elma is a liberated woman. She certainly has no Anglo hang ups about sex. She enjoys it. She is able to divorce the emotion from it iand certainly has used it, and felt no guilt about using it, to help her career. Men find both her lithe looks and direct manner a huge turn on, and I’m sure lesbian and bi-sexual women do too. 

Is Elma gay? I would say no. Has she slept with the odd woman along the way, perhaps been involved a couple of threesomes? I’m sure she has. It’s sex and fun to her. That’s it. I’m sure she was also curious and enjoyed it. So maybe she is bi-sexual but her tastes for the most part tend towards men. Does she find Noor attractive? Undoubtedly. Noor is a beautiful woman and she can appreciate that. But she also sees in Noor someone who men ogle and attempt to take advantage of, in the same way she was ogled and taken advantage of as a teenager. In a bizarre way she sees her friendship with Noor as a pure thing - it’s why when she discovers that Noor has something for Charlie that she is so indignant. It’s her certain belief that Charlie has cast a spell upon Noor and by doing so will ruin her life if she, Elma, doesn’t break it.

Has Elma loved along the way? No. The devastation of her affair and pregnancy with her high school teacher has pretty much precluded that. It’s as if she doesn’t want to become vulnerable or love in case she is hurt once again. She never loved the French ambassador. What she likes are powerful men - they are her turn on.

And then Rod comes along. Initially she wants to use him - get him to write an article that will help her get her UN posting. But then she begins to fall for him; I think part of it comes about because Noor has opened her heart. By caring for Noor, Elma allows herself to care and fall in love with a man she would usually not be attracted to.

And then Rod breaks her heart. It’s as if she is seventeen all over again. The pain only worse because she is older and thus feels all the more of a fool. It embitters her. At this point you could argue that she is not sexually attracted to Noor but what she wants is to wrest Noor’s love / loyalty / devotion (whatever you wish to call it) from Charlie. There can be no sharing here. She needs to win this fight to soothe her own ego and when she loses it, her fury meets no bounds. She destroys Noor’s scholarship and reverts to her old ways - so much so that Ivor and the lure of the UN posting allows her to destroy Noor’s life.

She is not evil - she knows she’s done wrong. She hates herself for it. It is the reason she sleeps with Ivor. She feels she deserves nothing more or better in this life. If she could take back what she’s done she would. For while she’s not gay or sexually attracted to Noor, she realizes that she loved her, and as the old saying goes, in this life you end up hurting the ones you love the most.

Phew - just finished reading the original drafts of Book Two and Book Three. Phew, they aren’t terrible … in fact there are some parts that are pretty decent.

Obviously plenty of work to do - for starters they were written in the first person from Charlie’s perspective, some characters have changed considerably since I finished the drafts four years ago, and there is way to much narrative summary! The good news though is that the plot is not going to change considerably and since the Book One is now done, there won’t be anymore tinkering with Charlie and Noor’s essential natures.

I hope to have plotted out both books by the end of the Christmas holidays and will then embark on rewriting them January 2nd. I suspect I can get Book Two done with a polish by May and out there for you to read, with Book Three perhaps another three or four months beyond that.

If you would like to be notified of Book Two’s impending release please go to my website www.ngosborne.com and in the Contact section send me your email address. A number of readers have asked for this.

I am so excited to get back into Noor and Charlie’s continuing journeys and can’t wait to share them with you.

Happy holidays. Nick

In The Washington Post today there was an article about a government run boarding school in Afghanistan called Pashtunistan. The reason the government started it was because the previous schools its pupils had attended had either been burnt to the ground or closed by the Taliban.

Now I think it’s pretty common knowledge that the girls education is anathema to the Taliban but boys … that was something new to me. According to the article the Taliban sees the schools they’ve shuttered as places which spread Afghan government propaganda or even worse Western ideology.

But what I suspect is that deep down the Taliban are scared of education in general, because an educated population is one that will think for itself and in so doing reject its prehistoric doctrines. For the Taliban the only appropriate education seems to be one where students learn the Koran by rote. Yet since their students are never taught Arabic they never actually understand the holy text and thus are as reliant as ever on the Taliban’s distorted interpretation of it.

What this school shows is that the thirst for education cannot be so easily quashed. These boys are no different than Malala Yousafzai – the fourteen year old girl shot in Pakistan.  They refuse to bow to threats, they strive to improve their minds and in turn better their country.

The Sandy Hook school shooting affected me deeply. With two children of a similar age to the victims, my heart went out to those small children and to their parents who now have to live without them. At this holiday time in particular they are in my thoughts and prayers.

In the greater scheme of things what Adam Lanza did was intimidate students and parents all across this country. Despite the infinitesimally small odds of a shooting happening at our own children’s schools, he has made us fear for their safety when we drop them off and made us consider such crazy notions as arming teachers. 

Yet in Taliban controlled parts of Afghanistan the likelihood of being shot or killed for going to school is an every day reality. Can you imagine the bravery of these students and their teachers?

If there is one thing we can do this holiday season amidst the plethora of gifts our children will receive, let’s remind ourselves that the greatest gift of all in this life is a well rounded education … an education that I pray one day will be free of any intimidation for Afghan students, be they boys and girls, and though it saddens me to say it, for their American contemporaries as well.

In the novel, Noor’s ardent desire (and that of her father) is to obtain a scholarship to a university in either Europe or the United States. When we first meet her it’s clear that it’s been a fruitless task. As Aamir Khan, her father, tells Charlie, she has applied to 31 universities, been rejected by 14, and received no word back from another 17. Yet still she continues to persevere.

In the book, she writes an application essay for the University of Amsterdam and I thought I would share it since, in many ways, it sums up both her world view and her hopes for both herself, Afghanistan and the world. They are the hopes I believe of so many women like her.

On my twelfth birthday my father gave me Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf. This may strike you as a peculiar gift from a father to a daughter, especially to a daughter so young, but you must understand my father is a peculiar man, peculiar in all the best possible ways.

To say the book had an impact on me would be a gross understatement. I suspect this was because the subjects that preoccupied it were so prominent in my part of the world. There’s no better example than Afghanistan of Three Guineas’ central message regarding the interconnectedness between male patriarchy, education and war.

I’m an Afghan refugee from a war that’s claimed over a million lives, a war that’s been raging for a decade now and, despite the imminent fall of the Communist regime, looks likely to continue on in some new and reconstituted form.

I’m also a woman from a society that’s never placed any value in women’s work, where young girls can be bartered for the misdeeds of their male family members, and which every day finds new ways to restrict what women can do. Here men rule supreme with women unable to make decisions of even the slightest import. Most of us are forced into burqas when we venture outside, and inside we must labor for our menfolk without reward. The greatest insult of all is that our men tell us they do this out of concern for our honor, but there is no honor to be had in this world unless you have freedom and are treated as an equal.

Despite our history, martial qualities are still celebrated by my people as if they’re the essence of what it means to be a man. It’s ironic that Afghanistan is known for its opium fields, for if anyone is a ruinous addict it’s my country that bemoans this war yet continues to instill in our boys a reverence for fighting.

At present the United Nations ranks Afghanistan as the poorest nation on the planet. When you exclude half your population from productive life and only teach the other half how to fight and recite (rather than understand) the Holy Quran how could that not be the case? Given this situation it is understandable that I was seduced by the words of the outsider in Three Guineas who says “As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.” And yet as Virginia Woolf predicted I’m unable to abandon my country, and I hope you’ll forgive me if I quote her further with a little artistic license.

“And if, when reason has said its say, still some obstinate emotion remains, some love of Afghanistan dropped into a child’s ear by the cawing of rooks in a mulberry tree, by the hum of a kite overhead, or by Pashtun voices murmuring nursery rhymes, this drop of pure, if irrational, emotion she will make serve her to give to Afghanistan first what she desires of peace and freedom for the whole world.”

You see despite the indignities I’ve experienced and the tragedies I’ve endured I still love my country and hope to craft a better future for it one day. I fervently believe that if we can promote the education of women we might slowly but surely break our ruinous obsession with war. It should be an education that stresses compassion and non violence to our children because one day that will turn into advice given to imams and tribal leaders, governors and presidents, and aggression and wars over property (or may I be so bold to say human souls) will lessen, and a more peaceful coexistence of humans as equals will result.

This may seem like some fanciful dream but isn’t Germany a country that celebrates such values? If the society that gave birth to the holocaust and the blitzkrieg can achieve this, can’t we Afghans do so too?

To do my part I need further education, an education in educating so to speak, and that’s something I’ll never be able to obtain living here in a refugee camp on the outskirts of the most fundamentalist city in Pakistan.

In Virginia Woolf’s other great treatise In A Room Of One’s Own, she contended that an equally talented sister of Shakespeare’s would never have written a word, let alone a play, for all people need a living wage and a private place or else their potential will never be realized. What I humbly ask you to provide me with is just that – an opportunity to broaden my mind at your inspiring university with just enough money that I might live. I might not write Hamlet or Twelfth Night, in fact I can guarantee you I won’t, but I know if you are kind enough to afford me this opportunity that I will flourish and maybe, just maybe, I can be part of a wave that will turn my beloved country into a more equitable and peaceful place for all Afghans, and by extension for everyone in the world.

Yours truly, Noor Jehan Khan

First and foremost, I’m not going to give away the ending of “Refuge” in this post so if you haven’t read it yet or are only halfway through, I promise this won’t spoil it for you.

Okay with that out of the way, I want to address the fact that there are more books to come since I have detected some frustration in recent days in regard to this. It’s not that readers haven’t liked the ending - actually let me reword that - it’s not that readers haven’t appreciated it, it’s just that they’ve ended up feeling frustrated because they want to know where Noor and Charlie’s story goes from here and they don’t want to wait.

Thankfully the majority of the comments have been of the variety that they loved the book and can’t wait for Book Two, but some have been of a more irritated nature. One reviewer told her friends that they should probably wait until Book Two arrives before plunging into Book One, while another just felt cheated.

Now first off, I apologize for not indicating the book is a series. If you’ve read my previous posts you’ll know that originally I intended it to be a single book, but when the first draft hit 250,000 words I realized I’d have to break it up into thirds. I think one of the reasons I didn’t indicate it was a series was because I didn’t know if I would write Book Two let alone Book Three. I mean what would happen if no one liked it? Would I devote thousands upon thousands of hours to what would be a fruitless exercise? Further I felt strongly that “Refuge” stood up well on its own. In fact a good friend of mine, and a nihilist of sorts, begged me not to write the other books - he felt the ending was exactly where it should end.

Now I might have agreed except I had from the get-go had a conception of where the story would culminate. I’m obviously not going to tell you what that ending is but be rest assured that I know it and it won’t change.

In terms of telling other readers to wait until all three books are finished before plunging in, I do have to object. First, if no one buys the book then there is little incentive for me to write the next two. I know how Noor and Charlie’s story ends so in a curious way I am satisfied, but I need others to want to know if I’m going to undertake the arduous task of crafting it properly.

Secondly I’m not the first author to write a book that is then followed by further installments. The master of this was Charles Dickens who released his books in twenty monthly installments, but couldn’t Stephanie Meyer and J.K. Rowling be considered more modern equivalents. Should J.K. Rowling have written all seven Harry Potters before anyone read them? Trust me if the first had sold a 1000 copies, I severely doubt she would have even gotten around to the second. 

Finally there’s a part of me that thinks that waiting is good. Delayed gratification is something that our on demand society is not used to, but it’s my suspicion from my own life experiences that it has its upsides. Whenever I have truly accomplished something in this life, I’ve often been astonished to discover that the accomplishment wasn’t that important, it was the journey I took to get there that was. Perhaps it’s a good thing that Book Two and Book Three aren’t in print yet. Perhaps it will mean that Charlie and Noor will stay with you longer, and perhaps (AND THIS IS A SPOILER SO DON’T FINISH THIS PARAGRAPH IF YOU HAVEN’T FINISHED THE BOOK) you will, in a small way, be able to share their agony at the end of Refuge. If Book Two and Book Three were readily available I doubt you would feel it so acutely - especially the injustice which so many women across the world have to endure.

So with all that said here is my pledge. I pledge that within the midst of my Hollywood, and at this time sole moneymaking, career, and without sacrificing what is most important, my family, that I will set to writing (or rewriting since I have a first draft already written) Book Two. I won’t sacrifice quality - as you know I wrote eight drafts of Refuge - but I suspect it will be a lot quicker this time around. Noor, Charlie, Tariq, Ivor, Elma, the Prince, Wali and Bushra are all now fully formed in my mind. The majority of the book takes place in Saudi Arabia and I have done the research needed to write it truthfully.

Thank you for all the comments, thank you for all your passion, thank you most of all for caring. I can’t tell you how humbled it makes me and how indebted I am to you for giving me the greatest gift a writer can ask for - to be read.

I first started sketching out the story for Refuge in November 2006. (As I sit here writing this I have to pause - six years - bloody hell!)

I had an urge to write a love story, and if I could be so bold, a classic love story. It wasn’t that I thought I could ever write something on the level of a Charlotte Bronte, Leo Tolstoy or Louis de Bernieres, I doubted anything I wrote would even exist within their shadows, however those were the novels I always loved the most - grand, sweeping, romantic epics - Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, Love In The Time of Cholera, Corelli’s Mandolin, Anna Karenina - novels which had an intense central love story but which at their core were about so much more. So being utterly foolhardy that was the perilous journey I decided to take.

I wasn’t a writer, I was a film producer, and I think much of the urge to write a novel came from the frustrations of being a producer. That topic, in of itself, deserves a post all of its own, but it’s suffice to say that a film producer at the end of the day is creatively subservient to both the director and studio. Most frustrating of all your influence over the project only diminishes the further along it progresses. “Why didn’t you write a screenplay?” some people have asked me and the answer’s simple. Film writers lose control over their work even quicker than film producers. No, only a novel would allow me complete creative control from start to finish.

And so then the question was what was my story going to be about? Some wag once said that writers spend the whole of their lives writing about their twenties and to a certain extent I agree. It’s the time when you’re most idealistic and adventurous, the time that leaves the most lasting impression on you and if there was an event that had a lasting impression on me it was the twelve months I spent working in Peshawar, Pakistan (though technically I was only 18 / 19 at the time). The added advantage was that it took note of that age old admonition to “write what you know” and while I had never had a passionate affair with an Afghan refugee I did know that world and that culture intimately.

So that’s how it all began. I quickly fixed upon the characters of Charlie and Noor - a young, confident American aid worker and a fiercely independent Afghan refugee - and within a couple of months I had the whole story laid out in treatment form. It would take me another two and a half years to finish the first draft.

Now there are some good reasons that it took that long. First and foremost I was running a humming production / management company at the time. I worked a 12 hour day and the only time I had to write was from around 9pm to 11pm every night and on the weekends - something that became increasingly hard after Harry, my son, was born in July 2007.

The other reason was that the book truly had taken on epic proportions. The treatment, you see, was a love story that spanned a decade. “A decade?” you say. “But Refuge only takes place over a period of six months.” Well in its original iteration the end of Refuge is only a third of the way into the book. 

My momentum wasn’t helped either by Remember Me getting green lit by Summit Entertainment. I don’t know if you know the film but if you don’t it is a love story (do you detect a theme here?) starring Robert Pattinson and Emilie de Ravin, and co starring Pierce Brosnan and Chris Cooper. I was determined to finish the book before we went into the insanity of full pre-production and I managed to pull off that feat in April 2009. 

The book was 250,000 words and was entitled Haraam - The Memoir of Charlie Matthews. (Haraam means forbidden in Arabic). As I typed the last sentence in a coffee shop in the West Village I thought I had written a masterpiece! Hell I was writing in the West Village, how could it not be?

Stephen King in his book On Writing suggests that all authors, especially the ones who are newer to the occupation, put their manuscripts in a locked box for at least four weeks before re-reading them. It allows the author perspective and is in his view vitally important. I was lucky. Remember Me was a very intense production. With Rob in the lead role we had to contend with 1000s of fans some days and often 50 paparazzi. I totally forgot about the book and it wasn’t until I returned to my home in Los Angeles in September that I read my “masterpiece”.

Perhaps 4 months away from the book was too long for all I can say is that I hated it. I would read it in the bath (yes, I am an avid bath reader) and despite the heat would feel a chill run down my spine and a cold sweat on my brow. How could I write such dog awful prose? Why didn’t I care for my characters? What on earth had I been thinking?

At that moment I was tempted to chuck in the whole enterprise, but I didn’t. I suppose if there is a quality I’ve been blessed with in this life it is perseverance, so I sat down and tried to work out what to do.

The major thing that stuck out at me is that I was as much if not more interested in Noor as I was in Charlie. Yet we never saw Noor’s point of view because I had written the novel from only Charlie’s perspective. (It had after all been constructed as his memoir). Noor was going to be given her own pages from now on. The book would go from being told in the 1st person to the 3rd person.

I then read Sol Stein’s great book Stein On Writing which convinced me to chuck vast chunks of narrative summary (the book was overwhelmed by it) and try and write as much as I could in a more present fashion; this was something that suited me fine coming from the film world. 

And I made the decision to focus any rewrite on just the first third of the book - the time Charlie and Noor spend in Pakistan. The idea of rewriting the whole book was just too overwhelming. I also felt that it was asking a lot of readers to commit to a 250,000 word book from a first time novelist.

So once I again I plunged in. Writing scenes from Noor’s point of view really opened up the story and the more I wrote her the more I fell in love with her. She owes a lot to my wife, Clarke, who is fiercely independent and strong in her views, but she also owes a lot to my daughter, Frankie, who had just been born. I wanted Noor to be someone whom my daughter could learn from and be inspired by. By writing her it also opened up the character of Aamir Khan who I suspect encapsulated the father I wanted to be to my daughter - someone who would never allow her to believe that she wasn’t utterly equal to men and capable of anything. What made Aamir Khan so radical was that he was this type of father in a society that was so patriarchal.

The second draft was swiftly followed by a third draft and by December 2010 it was complete. Finally it was time to get some reads - I gave it to a few close friends, Clarke and my mother (who’s been a tireless advocate on the book’s behalf) and waited for feedback. To my immense relief everyone seemed to really like the book but something Trevor, my business partner at the time, said stuck out. He felt that it would be good to see Tariq’s side of things. Initially the comment irritated me - didn’t he understand that the whole construct was to see it from purely Noor and Charlie’s point of view? - but the more I thought about it the more it made sense. And hell if we were going to see Tariq’s side of things, we might as well see Elma’s and perhaps a little of Aamir Khan’s and Ivor’s too.

Once again another character came to life. As I delved into Tariq’s story I came to understand him better. A young man still wounded by the loss of his mother, who growing up in a war zone shrunk from his father pacificity and embraced the certitudes of a highly regimented and fundamentalist mujahideen organization. A young man whose family had lost their station in life and who now desperately wanted to rise socially once more. A man of ambition - a man who would marry off his sister to an awful man if it meant he, himself, advanced. By increasing Tariq’s role I also enabled there to be a thriller element through the tale.

The fourth draft was swiftly followed by a fifth draft where I added in the subplot regarding Kamila, and Noor’s desperate attempt to save her. It also afforded Charlie the opportunity to do something that Noor would love him for doing. I also changed the book’s expositional tense from a past form to a present one. (i.e ‘Charlie ate an apple’ became ‘Charlie eats an apple’.) Between the two drafts I had read Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and loved it. It was written in the present voice and I thought it gave that period tale a very modern and immediate feel. I embraced it wholeheartedly.

I also embraced the note of my good friend, Will Fetters, the writer of Remember Me, that the book needed to begin with a bang. It was here that I wrote the opening escape from Kabul. It had always been a part of Noor’s history but now I wrote it as if it was happening in actual time.

By now the book was also called Refuge after going through a very awkward stage of being entitled The Prerogative of the Brave. The book went out once again to friends, I got more notes and a sixth draft was produced.The book, in my opinion, was finally finished. It was August 2011. I had high hopes.

The book was sent to agents in both the UK and the US. Charlotte Boundy at Harper Collins was a huge fan, as was Jon Kassir at CAA, and they helped me get the book out to literary agents. (Bizarrely having been in the film business for 15 years I didn’t know any.) These were exciting times; not every agent wanted to sign me but three did and their enthusiasm for the book seemed palpable. How could I not sell the book if three agents wanted to sign me?

I elected to go with Jon Elek at AP Watt, a venerable old London literary agency. It was then that I embarked on the seventh draft. A note I had received from many agents was that Charlie wasn’t very sympathetic. For a while I got on my high horse - sympathetic? Who cares? As long as Charlie was empathetic that’s all that mattered. But then I re-read the novel again, and I came to conclusion that they could be right. I didn’t particularly care for Charlie either.

You see the Charlie of the first six drafts was a bit of a hound dog, to put it lightly. In many ways I thought this was cool - it gave him an arc. Between drafts three and six he and Elma had a very intense sexual affair at the beginning of the novel before he fell in love with Noor. Something else also stood out - someone told me that they saw no reason why Noor would fall in love with him - they had too little in common. 

And so in the seventh draft, I drilled down into his character. I finally discovered his backstory - the story of his mother’s death, his falling out with his father. He became a softer, more sympathetic young man. A man with a hidden artistic and intellectual core. By extension Elma also changed considerably - now that she wasn’t having an affair with Charlie her whole story was different. She became an ambitious aid worker determined to get a job at the UN who along the way falls in love with a journalist.

The book was once again done. Finished - at least until a publishing house editor gave me some notes. In April 2012, Jon Elek took the book out, first to publishers in the UK and then in May to publishers in the US. The book came oh so close. First we had an offer from Italy - Jon assured me this was great news but for it to close we needed an offer from the UK too. Then he called me excitedly one morning to tell me that a senior editor at one of the houses loved the book and wanted to buy it. If she wanted it then the deal was as good as done. But then a week later the news came back that her marketing department weren’t into the book - as far as I could tell they thought that Afghan stories didn’t sell.

I once read a book that said in imperial Japan they never told the condemned the day of their execution. Rather you just knew that if they hadn’t come for you by 8 am (the time of execution) that you had at least another day to live. That was somewhat my situation - except in reverse. You see with Jon eight hours ahead in the UK if I didn’t see an email from him when I woke up then I knew there was no news to be had for another day. 

As May stretched towards June I knew the book wasn’t going to sell. As a producer / manager I had been to this rodeo many, many times in Hollywood on behalf of other writers. Jon’s emails became sporadic at best and finally I emailed him and said I was done. I was going to take it out myself under my own imprint.

Once again another project came in the way - a Conquistador TV show I was developing. (By now I had sold my share of my company to Trevor and fully committed to being a writer.) But when there was a lull in the proceedings I re-read the book once more and the startling realization I came to was that I had made Charlie too soft. Yes he had been a horn dog before but at least there had been something fun about him.

And so into the eighth draft I strode and truly only in this draft did Charlie finally become fully formed. (Noor had been so for a number of drafts). He didn’t lose his deeper qualities, he just was more laid back and chill. I also took a knife to the text. I had reduced the 7th draft from 150,000 words to 125,000 words and this draft came down to 110,000 words. At least to me there was no longer an unnecessary moment or word.

There is so much I haven’t discussed - how Wali was conceived, the fact that I went wobbly on the ending for the briefest of moments only for Laura, an old intern and fan of the book, to set me straight, the writing of Noor’s essay, the endless rewriting of Charlie’s relations with his students, the maturation of Wali and Bushra’s turn from being a villain to a more sympathetic figure.

What is astonishing, however, is that despite all the changes the basic structure of the Refuge never altered from that first treatment. And I suspect that will be the case with books two and three. I am lucky, I have a first draft to work from, however flawed it may be, and while all my characters have changed and deepened along this journey I have taken them, I, as their creator, know their destinies and I’m determined to write them down.

I promise you, I just won’t take so long this time!

So for 2 days (11/18 and 11/19) the kindle version of REFUGE will be free and I couldn’t be more excited.

I am sure there are some authors who write purely to make money but I suspect they are few and far between. When you think of the many hours, days, months, years it takes to write a novel you’d have to be mad to embark on it as a money making venture.

No, you write, or at least I did, because you have a story you want to tell and characters whom you love. I wanted to see where the story took mine -in many ways I was as surprised at the twists and turns that befell Noor and Charlie as people who’ve read the novel. I also realized that their story could not be told fully in one novel so there are 2 more to come and many hours, days, months, years ahead for me!

But you’re also mad if you write purely to write. The purpose of writing is to be read, otherwise it is a purely selfish task. If you truly believe your novel has something to say, that it can enthrall and move people, then it is your job to make sure it gets read as widely as possible.

I believe in REFUGE and Noor and Charlie’s story. I know many people have gotten utterly wrapped up in it and hope you do too. There’s probably no better way of enabling that to happen than to give it away free - what have you got to lose by downloading it - and so this Sunday and Monday I hope you do. I look forward eagerly to hearing what you thought.

When we think of the struggle for women’s rights, the rights we most often think of are the right to vote, the right to property and the right to work and equal pay. These are all phenomenally important rights, and ones that women in the West have fought hard to secure. However I would argue that the most important right of all is the right to love.
 
Many of the novels I’ve been most drawn to in this life – Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina, Pride & Prejudice, Middlemarch – have had at their heart these incredibly strong and courageous women; women who’ve battled the popular perceptions of their time and have courageously loved despite the obstacles and scorn flung their way.
 
Now 150 years later, it may seem as if their struggle is antiquated. But what these women fought for in the nineteenth century is exactly what so many women in the Muslim women are struggling for now.
 
20 years ago I spent 12 months as an idealistic, young aid worker teaching in a school and an Afghan refugee camp on the outskirts of Peshawar, Pakistan. It was one of the most eye opening experiences of my life. I had never seen a woman in a burqa before and the only thing more shocking was the fact that most women wore them. In the main, the women there were third class citizens living in a patriarchal feudal system with few rights. Yet the rights they did have were strangely the ones that Western women had fought hardest to secure, namely the right to vote, the right to work (if only in the most menial of jobs) and the right to property (a central tenet of Islam).
 
The one right they didn’t have was the right to love.
 
Here are the facts. The United Nations estimates that 50% of all Afghan girls are forced into marriage before reaching the age of 15. Pakistan is the 3rd most dangerous country in the world for women with 1000 women and girls murdered every year in ‘honor killings’ and 150 suffering horrendous acid attacks. Most rapes go unreported and the reason is simple: unless a woman has four male witnesses it is almost certain that she will be charged with adultery or a ‘moral crime’. In Afghanistan 87% of women have experienced some form of ‘intimate violence’ – i.e. either a forced marriage or physical, sexual or psychological abuse. In many areas of Afghanistan the practice of ‘baad’ is common in which girls are given away to settle disputes between families.
 
This is why of all rights, the freedom to love is the one that should be most cherished and hardest fought for. For when a woman is not allowed to love whom she wants, she is in essence being told that her feelings are worthless and when you cannot act on your feelings you are no more than an emotional prisoner. Conversely if men can control whom a woman marries, they will never respect their opinions or look upon them as anything but their property.
 
On the other hand, if women are free to love (and free to suffer its consequences) they own the essence of who they are and all other freedoms will follow. Further men will come to look upon them as equals – for, if nothing else, in order to gain a wife they’ll have to earn their love and respect. In my opinion, this is the underlying message of all the great novels I mentioned earlier.
 
I am an optimist, as Frankin Roosevelt said in his fourth inaugural “the great fact to remember is that the trend of civilization itself is forever upward”. Yet if there is one area in which Western women could stand with their Muslim counterparts, I would argue that this is it.
 
The progress maybe glacially slow in many parts of the Muslim world, however I believe it will come and when it does, when all women are free to love whom they want and their men accept this fact, I believe the world, in turn, will be a more tolerant and peaceful place.

After the disappointment of not going to Africa, one of the things that sustained me was the idea that I was still going to teach some of the most impoverished kids in the world.

Dan Coulcher (who was my co-volunteer for the year) and I flew into Islamabad in September 1991, and after a couple of days in Islamabad we headed to the ancient and chaotic city of Peshawar in Pakistan’s North-West Province. To say it was a culture shock would be putting it lightly.

The school, however, was not located in the city but in a new, half-finished suburb, called Hayatabad. It sat beneath the looming Khyber Mountains and on one side was bordered by the vast and impoverished Afghan refugee camp of Kacha Gari.

The school, the Frontier Academy, was also half-built, a collection of one story red brick buildings surrounding a rough scrabble of grass. Given the fact that it was very much a work in progress and that its facilities at the time were incredibly basic compared to what I knew back in Britain, I could be forgiven for thinking initially that the schools’ enthusiastic and wonderful kids were from poor backgrounds.

However that impression soon began to crumble. First off, our headmaster and the founder of the school, Gohar Zaman, was retiring from his previous school to run this one and when we went to his retirement party at that other school we were stunned to discover that it was the elite secondary school in Peshawar. Now this shouldn’t be seen as a knock on Gohar Zaman - after all I had been fortunate to go to a private school in England myself. The point was that my 18 year old idealistic self didn’t want to teach the sons of privilege.

“Well maybe the students at our school are different?” I said to a skeptical Dan. Dan thought that highly unlikely and when he quizzed the students about their backgrounds a lot of them, especially the boys who boarded, said they were from the families of tribal chiefs in the tribal areas. Shit!

Our work schedule was pretty brutal going from approximately 6:30am in the morning to 8pm at night, six days a week, and perhaps that along with the lingering cultural shock allowed me to keep my head buried in the sand … but then Gohar took us on a trip up the Khyber Pass.

Unfortunately this is not something most Westerners can do anymore, (it was even hard to do at the time), but it is incredible drive, as you wind your way up through these arid mountains, the mountains pushing in on you ever more the higher you go. On the peaks above are old British forts and down desolate ravines, fortified tribal compounds.

And then, the mountains fall away, and you find yourself on a plateau. As you and your police escort (yes, we had one!) race down the road you pass these vast mud-walled compounds, perhaps six in total, and then you come across the piece-de-resistance, a compound double the size of any of them, with walls made from exquisite brick, and with guard towers every 50 yards or so. As we came up to its large and extravagant gates, Gohar turned in his seat and said “we are going to visit one of our student’s parents” and after a brief search by the four AK-47 wielding guards we roared inside. We might as well have entered Shangri La.

In contrast to the barren mountains outside, here was a compound the size of multiple football fields, with marble villas, deep blue swimming pools, rose gardens, verdant lawns high end cars, air conditioned cattle courts, and sumptuous rooms with gold swords hanging on the walls, mahogany dining room tables, and fine rugs at every turn.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ql6nFU2LXgQ&feature=relmfu

In essence it was a self contained, luxury compound and the reason as I would soon discover was because it was owned by Ayub Afridi who it was claimed was the biggest drug lord in Pakistan.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haji_Ayub_Afridi

Now I have no way knowing if the charges against Ayub are true or not - the only point is that when you are an 18 year old idealist the idea that you are teaching the sons of one of the richest drug lords in the world is soul crushing …

Dan and I complained to Project Trust but there was nothing they could do … all they said was that if we truly wanted to come home we could. I was faced with the awful prospect of returning home a failure - once more I couldn’t contemplate that.

So Dan and I went in search of a job working with Afghan refugees and we found one with International Rescue Committee teaching adult refugees English in the afternoon. And then with a boldness I’m still amazed we possessed at such a young age, we went to Gohar and told him that from now on we’d need the afternoons off. He was appalled at the prospect but it was our condition of staying and he reluctantly agreed.

Finally I was set to embark on the type of work I’d dreamed of doing … it would be one of the most exhilarating and exhausting periods of my life.

It’s hard to believe but it’s now 20 years since I worked and lived in Pakistan, and it was all because I wanted to be an aid worker in Africa.

In Britain it’s common for high school students to take a GAP year: most often they work for 3 months to raise money, do 3 months or so of volunteer work in a developing country and then travel around the world for the remaining 6 months before heading off to university.

I was determined to go hardcore - I wanted to do 12 months of aid work believing only by doing so could I truly understand a culture and I wanted to do it in Africa. At the time I was swept up in the whole “Free Mandela” fervor and nothing excited me more than the idea of working in a township like Soweto or say an impoverished village in Namibia.

There was only one outfit that really offered such a chance - Project Trust - a charity based on this distant, foggy island off the west coast of Scotland - which sent volunteers all over the world for 12 months. It was a British version of the Peace Corps. I applied, then journeyed there for a 4 day selection course whose most notable moment was digging peat for hours in the pouring rain, and then I filled out my country preferences - in order they were South Africa, Namibia and Zimbabwe …

A few weeks later I got a letter from them (yes these were still the days of snail mail). “Congratulations,” it said, “you have been chosen to be one of Project Trust’s select volunteers in … Peshawar, Pakistan.”

When I read those final two words I think I almost vomited. Not because I had an inherent dislike of Pakistan, (in factI knew almost nothing about it), but because I had set my heart so fully on Africa. At first, I thought it must be a mistake but no, when I called Project Trust, they told me that was indeed where I was going. I protested - the whole point of applying to Project Trust was to go to Africa - and if I couldn’t go there then I wouldn’t go at all. They were unmoved, if that was my decision so be it.

But here was the problem. For the last couple of months, I’d told every friend, teacher and relative I came into contact with that I was going to be a volunteer in my GAP year and, in I suspect a somewhat smug tone, that I was going to do a full year’s work - not some ‘vanity’ version of only 3 months. How could I pull out now? Everyone would think I was a fraud.

So with deep reluctance I agreed to go … it turned out to be one of the best decisions I ever made.