Malta Calling

I've been inundated lately by questioners wanting to know what sort of book about Malta I have in the works ("have you been inspired?"). In the interest of satisfying some curiousity and perhaps even getting a comment or two of feedback, here's the book's working outline?

After selling his house, his car and his bubble coat and moving to Malta for a year to write a book about the mysterious and absorbingly beautiful island nation, American author [my name here] and his family of seven can’t seem to stay out of the way of remarkable occurrences. First, it’s just fights at restaurants, festival brawling, and automobile accidents; but then, like Forrest Gump, they always seem to be present wherever the remarkable happens: a fatal plane crash, an oil bunkering vessel run aground, the arrival of a shipwrecked group of African refugees.

Having arrived during high tourist season, no one really seems to take much notice of the American family. In fact, they feel studiously ignored. But when the tourist season ends and they’re still padding around, frequenting the shops, attending a neighborhood church and school, riding the buses and beating a worn path to the seaside promenade, things change. As the weeks wear on, more and more locals seem to know their business, sometimes even before they do. Although the family is formally introduced to very few Maltese people, the neighbors, shopkeepers and even the crazy bus drivers seem to know their names and often where they’re going and what they’re looking for on any particular day.

A remarkable series of occurrences leads the author to wonder if he’s not being followed around the island. You see, some of his writings on an internet travel-blog are rather critical of modern Maltese life – the drivers are nuts, the sidewalks want fixing, the food is grade D but edible, the elevators are unreliable, the dogs leave their marks, and the beaches are butt-strewn. Strange messages begin to appear in the blog comment boxes about the same time that [My Name Here] starts noticing that several Maltese people seem to be, not exactly following him, but turning up wherever he happens to venture. Are we under surveillance, he wonders, when he first spots two guys smoking inside a 1970 Mini Cooper parked across the street from their flat? It's an idle and amusing thought at first, but eventually he takes it all rather more seriously. And why does he keep seeing the same two elderly twin ladies (Long Hair and Short Hair) everywhere he goes?

You see, Malta’s tourist industry is failing and the government has blundered by spending an exorbitant amount of money (millions, millions) on a failed publicity campaign ('Brand Malta'), run by a high-paid Norwegian PR consultant, whose grand idea is to get the Maltese to be nice to the people who pay their bills. Everyone knows [My Name Here] is an author, and though they don’t seem to know much else about his writing task -- no one ever asks --  he wonders if there just might be a “task force” to influence him on the outcome of his book – which could very well ‘make or break’ Malta’s tourist industry if his book (Cheaper By the Dozen meets Under the Tuscan Sun) gets published in the UK, Germany or even in Russia.

How else to explain that everyone now seems to have turned from rude or apathetic to happy and almost helpful? As one Maltese acquaintance said upon the Roses’ arrival in the country: Malta is a small place, and everyone knows everybody else’s business – for better or worse.

(For those of you who don't know me and asked, I've six published books to my name -- including one bestseller, two that are now out-of-print, and one that no one seems to ever buy).

I should also add that the appendix will include '101 Things the Malta Tourist Authority Doesn't Want You to Know'  and '101 Belligerent Tips for Making Your Way Around the Maltese Islands' and '101 Ways to Look, Act and Speak Like a Local' -- don't worry, it's humorous (really), not insulting.

I've already got the theme music picked out -- you know, just in case Major Motion Pictures Company wants to palimpsest The Book.