update: Writing Egypt Fiction was my 2nd job – now it's my 2nd career

My Living Flame Television commercial for natural gas won gold at Mobius International Film Festival, Chicago

What does a young writer do before he can afford to write books full time? 

(I wouldn’t wish an author’s income on anyone - at least not in their early days!)

I joined the Mad Men, working as an advertising copywriter and Creative Director in various multi-national agencies. I eventually worked in an agency with my own name on the door for almost a decade (Pond, Rice, Ogilvy & Mather).

Here are some more of my ads from my Mad Men days of my first career.

I coined this phrase back in 1979! It passed into the language somewhat and even turned up decades later on an American Cancer site

Towards the end of my ad career I chose to work for causes - like this campaign for World Vision worldwide. It also appeared on television. Along with the TV, it won a Mobius award 'best
cause campaign'

Lest we forget - for dementia

My second career... so far

Today, after years of visiting Egypt on research trips, writing fiction about ancient Egypt and archaeology is finally my career - and writing advertising for causes is my second job.

 Years of experiencing and researching Egypt

Here below is my series of adventure thrillers about a renegade outsider, Egyptologist Anson Hunter, an adventurer and theorist who has a vast and arcane knowledge about ancient Egypt's religious and magical practices... and a healthy respect for dangers today from the ancient past.

We first meet Anson Hunter in The Smiting Texts. Here is the series.

NEW

Nov 2012 - something different - two novellas in one

Egypt fiction - for your Kindle or iPad - "a wonderful way to lose yourself in what you love."

UPDATE 2023

UPDATE "The Mummy's Revenge" Egypt children's fiction hit... returns on Kindle (and now the trilogy in one big scary Kindle edition)

Long before Harry Potter there was cousin Harry and his scary Egypt computer games...

This time for young Egypt fiction readers...(under the name Roy Pond)

DEAD FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS…

Harry is really weird. But he is family, so Josh and Amy try to make their cousin feel at home during his visit. That’s when Harry shows them the game. The Mummy Monster Game. A game where the players find the pieces of a mummy – and put it back together again.

But each time they play, the game become more and more realistic, leaking dangers into their lives. So when Harry and Amy become trapped in the mummy’s tomb – inside the game – Josh realizes that this is a game like no other. This game is very real. And very deadly.

The first in a trilogy of Egypt adventures with Josh, Amy and Cousin Harry. Now on Kindle 

A great favourite with US children and schools, now in an Amazon Kindle edition

Click here

3 in one Kindle edition

2nd thriller in the Egypt series after The Smiting Texts

The Hathor Holocaust - scorching Egypt adventure thriller. 2nd in the series after The Smiting Texts

See the series here

Do you prefer ancient Egypt historical fiction – or modern adventure set against Egypt’s past?

Egypt fiction set in the past - or modern adventure set against the past?

A childhood favourite

I began by relishing historical ancient Egypt fiction - especially Mika Waltari’s The Egyptian – but in my own writing so far I prefer to explore the ancient past through a modern sensibility.

I prefer my main character, such as my controversial rogue Egyptologist Anson Hunter, to be a hero who collides with the ancient past and its dangers  - rather than be a character who lives in another time.

I’m not sure I would even read a 'costume drama' set in Egypt any more, let alone attempt to write one.

What sort of Egypt fiction do you prefer?

The Anson Hunter Egypt adventure thriller series

A lost, 2nd Great Sphinx? Just one of the dangerous secrets in The Anubis Intervention

What secret would a second Great Sphinx hide?

Early books speak of two great sphinxes like a pair of colossal bookends guarding the entrance to the Nile.

And in fact there did exist a second sphinx, according to Arab historians, a clay structure destroyed by earthquake and flood. 

But was this second, earthen sphinx on the Nile a poor relation of a sublime counterpart, an echo of another great structure from a distant age? 

Controversial archaeologist Anson Hunter theorizes exactly this in 'The Anubis Intervention' and fears that this second sphinx guards a dangerous secret.

But where is this lost chimera hidden?

It's just one of the revelations in the archaeological thriller, fourth in the series after The Smiting Texts, The Hathor Holocaust and The Ibis Apocalypse (Kindle and paperback from Amazon)

Now the complete series of Anson Hunter Egypt adventure novels is available

Now for the first time, the complete set of novels featuring renegade Eyptologist Anson Hunter is available in both Kindle and Amazon paperback editions

Please take a look inside and see opening chapters here

A lost pyramid, the lost 2nd Great Sphinx, a cataclysmic secret...

Masked attackers take over a Nile cruise boat filled with the world's top archaeologists. Have the gods risen up against Egyptology?

Here is a Kindle screen grab - the Prologue to the new Egypt suspense novel that follows The Smiting Texts, The Hathor Holocaust and The Ibis Apocalypse

Anson Hunter, renegade archaeologist and theorist, must find three of ancient Egypt's greatest lost treasures... in order to save a boatload of souls...
in a daring mission of guerilla archaeology - at gunpoint.

Praise for THE SMITING TEXTS... #1 in ancient Egypt adventure series

#1 in an an Egyptian adventure series...

Praise for THE SMITING TEXTS

“A sumptuous feast of Egypt's ancient past. The interspersed tale is particularly beautiful. Wonderfully clever and original.” - The Truth About Books, UK.

“Compellingly brought to life … a fast-paced adventure story that pulls you in and won’t let go, even after the last page.” - Read Between the Lines, Edinburgh.

"Such a great book! Very imaginative and factual at the same time... hopefully will reach a far wider readership than the Egyptology community." - Egypt Then and Now.

About The Author

The author's depth of knowledge as a writer of books on Egypt comes from a lifetime spent studying ancient Egypt and Egyptian archaeology and from numerous research trips to Egypt.

He is fascinated by the mystery of ancient Egypt and its potency and relevance for today's world.

Start the Egypt adventure series here

After the Arab Spring, a new Islamist Winter for Egyptology?

My fears for Western Egyptology

I can’t help feeling concern about the new era for archaeology in Egypt. Especially when an Egyptian imam recently suggested that pharaonic statues were no better that idols and they should have the heads covered in wax.

Maybe these new people hope the tourists will come in their millions to see their mosques and Islamic Cairo. Good luck with that.

It’s not that I lack appreciation of Islamic architecture.

I think much of it is breathtaking, but then I think the same about many Western cathedrals. Yet I can’t imagine people in the Islamic world dreaming about seeing them and willing to spend a quarter of a year’s salary to do so.

 My new archaeological adventure, about to be released in the New Year, is set in these turbulent times and follows on from The Smiting Texts, The Hathor Holocaust and the Ibis Apocalypse.

The Egypt adventure trilogy - about to become a series

Happy and mysterious reading this Christmas with the Egyptology adventure thriller series

The tremendous mystery of the sacred...

Anson Hunter is the rogue Egyptologist who specializes in dangers to the modern world from the ancient past.

This may seem absurd to many in our desacralized society where many people have no belief in unseen forces.

Yet Anson is a man with an open mind, one who struggles with a faith and yet is no stranger to the terrors of the ancient past, the mysterium tremendum of the sacred.

You can experience the tremendous mystery of ancient Egypt in the Anson Hunter series on Kindle - The Smiting Texts, The Hathor Holocaust and The Ibis Apocalypse...

with a fourth story due for release in early 2012.

Happy, and mysterious, Christmas reading! 

The gods and goddesses of Egypt, assailants in masks, take over a Nile cruise boat filled with the world's top Egyptologists
UPDATE: 9th January, 2012. NEW. 'The Anubis Intervention', the latest Anson Hunter archaeological mystery adventure novel, is now out, available through Amazon Kindle. It follows The Smiting Texts, The Hathor Holocaust and The Ibis Apocalypse. The trilogy is now a series...


Now you can begin the series with The Smiting Texts for just $2.99 on Kindle. 

Christmas fiction reading: Escape to sun, sand and suspense in Egypt fiction series

Add ancient Egypt to your Christmas holiday reading here

Egypt of the imagination... everywhere the glint of gold

What is it about ancient Egypt's fascination and gold?

Visiting the Tutankhamun 'Golden Age of the Pharaohs' Exhibition, reminded me of the strong association of gold and ancient Egypt in the public imagination...

Howard Carter, on peering into the tomb of Tutankhamun, summed it up with his description...."everywhere the glint of gold."  

The lustre of gold glows in the mysteries of The Smiting Texts trilogy of adventure novels and others in my Egypt series... as it does in this scene...

They reached another passage that opened up around them into a vestibule and then passed into a vast porticoed hall.

It was a hall that represented the chest cavity of the god. It was also a treasure chest of staggering proportions.

“Dear God of our Fathers!” Daniel said in a gasp.

“Out of the magic of its gold, heaven was born,” Anson said.

They were looking at the amassed hoard of the Neteru.

“Truly this is the Mother of all Treasures,” the veiled woman whispered.

Chapter 81

IT STRUCK HIS EYES with the impact of an eruption.

It was as if a mountain of gold had exploded and disgorged rivers of golden magma into the hall.

Gold choked the place like a glittering slag heap, spewed from chests in chains and necklaces, crusted in heaps of gorgets, amulets, cups, urns and crowns, pooled in dishes and plates, twisted and writhed in a tangle of statues thrown together like corpses. The excrescence solidified in thrones and tables and chairs and erupted in great shrines jammed together like a golden shantytown. Gold winked, flashed, lusted and glowered sullenly in darker corners. A fleet of golden boats lay in a tangle of masts and oars like the aftermath of a naval battle among the gods. More boats lay foundered among jeweled caskets.

In the Book of Revelation, God sat with the firmament beneath Him, and the brilliance of gemstones sparkling in His presence. Heaven was blinding in its beauty! There was no heaven after death. Instead, the traditions of a material heaven, handed down by untold generations, were true. This was it and his father had found it, stealing the hopes of all mankind.

A feeling came over Anson that he was about to vomit.

A sorrow washed over him with the force of a wave and when the shock receded, an undercurrent ripped him back to long ago.

My father left me as a child to chase after this glory. A man-made heaven.

Seek first the kingdom of heaven, Jesus said.

But my father had sought it on earth. Dig into your father’s ideas too deeply and you risk undermining your own foundations, his mother had said. Am I doomed to follow his trajectory? There seemed to be an inevitability about finding this, astounding as it was, a pattern that had to be made, like the changing of the seasons and the wheeling of the stars through the sky.

Fortune had turned like a grinding stone and now it was the son who stood in front of the terror of this golden realm.

When his Egyptologist father had left him as a child, Anson had tried to keep a piece of him by interiorizing him, creating a kind of inner shrine for him where he imagined his father sat alone in darkness like a god carved in stone. But his father was not a god and, if there were no heaven, was there even a god at all?

- From The Smiting Texts trilogy

An Egyptologist's murder... a heaven-and-earth-shattering discovery that threatens today’s great religions…

   

"Out of the magic of its gold, heaven was born."

“Then what did my father want to tell the world that was so radical? What exactly was his revelation?” Anson Hunter said.

Now Abuna, the Coptic monk, dropped his bombshell.

“He claimed to have made what he termed his ‘heaven-and-earth-shattering’ discovery - sensational proof in Egypt that would turn our ideas of heaven upside down, evidence that heaven was not a spiritual realm, but a real, three-dimensional hypogeum and that this was the genesis of the concept of a heaven. He had found the Duat, or Egyptian hereafter. ‘Out of the magic of its gold,’ he said, ‘heaven was born’.

“Equally important, he claimed that he had found evidence of the so-called Neteru, or beings of the First Time, buried in this place. My good friend, Professor Hunter, believed that there has been a conspiracy through the ages about the reality of the afterlife and that it still continues to this day. Your father was about to announce that he had found a material afterworld - heaven if you like. But not a spiritual nirvana, a real place and the genesis of all beliefs about the afterworld. It was a belief that may account for his untimely death in Egypt.”

 (From 'The Smiting Texts', first in a mystery adventure trilogy)

Who killed an Egyptologist with a heaven-and-earth shattering secret, in 'The Smiting Texts'?

Discover the secret here 

UPDATE: The Smiting Texts is Now a 9-book series

(Update) Glyphs Along The Highway for a mystery thriller writer on the road - with a credit to Ian Fleming

Do hieroglyphs hold any more potency than highway symbols?

Hump... or the Egyptian hieroglyph for 'foreign land'?

'Foreign land'...'hill country'

Author Ian Fleming wrote amusingly about the “exotic pungency” of USA road signs in his James Bond thriller ‘Live and Let Die’ – ‘SOFT SHOULDERS – SHARP CURVES – SQUEEZE AHEAD – SLIPPERY WHEN WET.’

As I take my ancient Egypt and mystery fiction writing on the road, I can’t help wondering about the glyphs we see at the roadside here in Australia.

How do these enigmatic signs compare with the ancient Egyptian glyphs that mark the underworld journeys of my renegade British archaeological hero Anson Hunter?

Like the menagerie of animals that appear in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs – Australian roadside glyphs possess a zoomorphic vocabulary, including kangaroos, koalas, wombats, ducklings, cattle, emus, crocodiles and sharks.

A zoomorphic roadside vocabulary

Some signage glyphs are as menacing as curses uttered by Egypt’s priests in execration rituals – “A microsleep can kill.” “You’re a bloody idiot!”

Roadsidce curse

Others are tenderly human when found along the harsh and merciless march of the bitumen - small children defensively holding hands. 

Another has a caption that makes the peril of road-crossing sound like a cosy adventure story – ‘Refuge Island’.

What would the Egyptians make of these signs?

One of the first recorded workers' strikes in history happened in Egypt in the reign of Rameses lll when the royal tomb workers downed their tools when their pay and rations were not forthcoming.

To other eyes, some of our signs might look like protest banners. End Roadwork! End School Zone! End Freeway!

Is it superstition to believe that the sacred writing of hieroglyphs held any more potency than road signs, even though they were invested with the power of heka, Egyptian magic?

My Egyptologist hero Anson Hunter has a respect for unseen dangers from the ancient past, execration texts, forbidden artefacts and the like. He is something of a phenomenologist, one who believes in granting value to the sacred, unlike conventional Egyptologists with their ‘agnostic reflex’ that prevents them from taking the esoteric seriously.

Perhaps the fact that there are others today with an agenda that takes its inspiration from the mystery religions of Egypt, who believe very seriously in the potency of Egypt’s past that warn us to be wary of unseen dangers breaking into the 21^st century.


The journey continues here on Amazon Kindle and paperback

"These novels untangle new mysteries of ancient Egypt"

Readers comments...

Update 2019: Now a series of 9 novels featuring the controversial, witty and "thoroughly likeable" (alternative) Egyptologist Anson Hunter.

Visit

These novels "untangle new mysteries about ancient Egypt..."

Screen grab: iPad (Amazon Kindle edition)

“(The hero, archaeologist) Anson Hunter untangles new mysteries about the ancient Egyptian civilization affirmation of survival after death by the power of symbolism and magic over matter, a virtual afterlife built by a collective unconscious, sustained by religion and tangible in the form of pyramids, temples and tombs. His elucidations are esoteric bombs that undermine the foundations of today’s world major religions.”

Egypt Then and Now

“Reads from the start like a P.I. or spy novel.” 

“I didn’t think fiction about ancient Egypt’s archaeology like this could be written today.” Readers' comments.

 

The smiting power of ancient Egypt breaks into the 21st Century

Excerpt from 'The Smiting Texts' - first in a series about dangers from the ancient past

Start reading the trilogy here

Ancient Egypt Fiction Collection - thrillers, adventure, fantasy...

Ancient Egypt series - featuring the renegade Egyptologist, Anson Hunter

And for young readers...

Do you prefer your Egypt fiction in paperback or in Kindle format?

Here is just some of my Egypt fiction collection available at Amazon.

From The Smiting Texts adventure thriller series to The Delta Dilemma - as well as an ancient Egypt collection for young adults and children.

LOOK INSIDE the collection here

"A fast paced Egypt adventure series - won't let go even after the last page"

And now there's a fourth in the series - The Anubis Intervention

Why hieroglyphs in Egypt's Stone Book of Thoth carry such potency - "The Ibis Apocalypse"

Glyphs were divine words

“And these glyphs in the Stela, what makes them so potent?” she said.

“Glyphs were never just a writing system," Anson Hunter said. "They were divine words. It’s for this reason that the scribes were fearful that certain words could have a malignant power and become uncontrollable forces in the tomb and so they would cut off the head of a lion in a glyph, or truncate a serpent or show spears stuck in the back of a crocodile in order to render it harmless. The hieroglyphs in the Stela of Thoth were the most potent of all. When spoken they were not just sounds, but glyphs graven on the air, real things and entities, image-meanings that took shape and activated a world of unseen forces and alternate reality. Heka, or Egyptian magic."

“So you believe Egyptian magic has power to influence the real world?”

“Can a certain sequence of words and actions, such as imitation, the replication of a name, image or mythical event produce an event in the real world? I believe there is an unseen connectedness between things and by tuning in to this network of likenesses you can attract like outcomes. The trick is to find that invisible skein and draw on it, hence the Egyptians’ use of puns, analogy, mimesis, acrostics, dualities and the like. These links are things beyond logic, like the dream realm where parallel sounds, symbols and stories, while seeming bizarre, hold an inner, often unseen connection with our lives.”

From 'The Ibis Apocalypse' #3 in the Egypt adventure series