Aart Hilal’s blog

Fantástico

http://paulocoelhoblog.com/2008/08/11/rolling-stone/

When angels talk

Nobody is courageous all the time. The unknown is a constant challenge, and being afraid is part of the journey.

What to do? Talk to yourself. Talk alone. Talk to yourself even if others think you have gone crazy. As we talk, an inner force gives us the security to overcome the obstacles that need to be surmounted. We learn lessons from the defeats that we are bound to suffer. And we prepare ourselves for the many victories that will be part of our life.

And just between you and me, those who have this habit (and I'm one of them) know that they never talk alone: the guardian angel is there, listening and helping us to reflect. What follows are some stories about angels.

Conversation in heaven

Abd Mubarak was on his way to Mecca when one night he dreamed that he was in heaven and heard two angels having a conversation.

"How many pilgrims came to the holy city this year?" one of them asked.

"Six hundred thousand", answered the other.

"And how many of them had their pilgrimage accepted?"

"None of them. However, in Baghdad there is a shoemaker called Ali Mufiq who did not make the pilgrimage, but did have his pilgrimage accepted, and his graces benefited the 600,000 pilgrims".

When he woke up, Abd Mubarak went to Mufiq's shoe shop and told him his dream.

"At great cost and much sacrifice, I finally managed to get 350 coins together", the shoemaker said in tears. "But then, when I was ready to go to Mecca I discovered that my neighbors were hungry, so I distributed the money among them and gave up my pilgrimage".

Continue...

Paulo Coelho

http://paulocoelhoblog.com/warrioroflight/

Published 07 August 2008

on www.newstatesman.com/society/2008/08/readers-film-internet-despite

The American journalist Jeff Jarvis has come by my house to interview me. Here I am, face to face with one of the most incisive technology journalists of today - via his blog BuzzMachine - and he is asking me what I think of the internet. I find the idea mind-boggling, to say the least; it would have been unthinkable a decade ago, when Google was a fledgling search engine and the internet a mystery to most of us.

Still, I had a suspicion at the time about the potential of this new medium, and I decided to launch my own website and newsletter, and opened an email account for readers who wanted to contact me. One of the myths about writers is that we write our books in lonely ivory towers; in my case, I was never very keen on the notion of the reclusive author working in solitude, and have always tried to interact with my readers.

So I've spent a lot of time on my website, knowing that it is one of the rare public platforms, besides the traditional book signing, open to me. Yet, despite the success of the site and newsletter, I felt that more could be done - but what? The answer is the result of ten years' fascination with the medium.

My virtual journey

In 2006, I decided that, rather than separate myself from the world, I would take a different path. The road is made by walking - this is the first tenet of every adventure. You place your foot on uncharted terrain and from there the road somehow imposes itself on the walker. I left my house in France for three months, visiting Tunisia, Italy, Bulgaria and Ukraine, before I embarked on my Trans-Siberian journey, a 5,772-mile trip from Moscow to Vladivostok.

I shared my experiences every two to three days with readers from all over the globe via my blog. The feedback was incredible - despite my being in this remote region, I wasn't alone: people were travelling with me through my words. The blog lasted a couple of months; I knew, though, that this first contact had to evolve somehow. But how?

Just like magic

When I returned home, I had a couple of months before the publication of my novel, The Witch of Portobello. I knew from previous experience that the free-sharing of my book over the internet would increase its visibility, so I didn't hesitate to post it on peer-to-peer websites and on my blog.

The more I've ventured into the virtual world, the more I have realised that the internet has a logic of its own and its credo is: share everything freely. This was my message when I spoke at the "Digital, Life, Design" conference in Munich earlier this year.

The feedback from readers and media alike to the internet incarnation of The Witch of Portobello was such that I started a blog called the Pirate Coelho, where I posted links to free electronic copies of my books. Of course, this "underground" activity was undertaken without the knowledge of my publishers. But on the official side of things, I was also exploring as many ways as possible of communicating with my public via websites such as MySpace, Facebook and YouTube.

Share and share alike

Then, one day last year in Geneva, after visiting the blogs of some of my readers, I had an idea: why not work together? From this simple thought emerged the Experimental Witch project. I extended an online invitation to participate in a film adaptation of The Witch of Portobello. Aspiring film-makers were asked to film one of the 13 tales that the book interweaves and post the results on YouTube. Musicians could use MySpace to send ideas for the soundtrack.

Now, the submissions are all in, and the winning entries will be announced on my birthday, 24 August. Though some excellent work may be left aside in arriving at a manageable length for the film, this distant collaboration means I have been able to see the film my readers picture as they read my work.

So I looked at Jeff after he'd finished his questions, and asked him: "What else should I do?"

Apparently, Jeff thinks I'm doing just fine.

Paulo Coelho

Paulo Coelho's "Brida" is published by HarperCollins (£14.99); visit http://paulocoelhoblog.com

August 4, 2008 10:08 AM

At MediaGuardian.co.uk

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/organgrinder/2008/08/novelist_paul_coelho_finds_the.html

Paulo Coelho certainly has nothing against selling books. He has sold an astounding 100m copies of his novels, writes Jeff Jarvis.

But he also believes in giving them away. He is a pirate. Coelho discovered the power of free when a fan posted a Russian translation of one of his novels online and book sales there climbed from 3,000 to 100,000 to 1m in three years. "This happened in English, in Norwegian, in Japanese and Serbian," he said. "Now when the book is released in hard copy, the sales are spectacular."

So Coelho started linking to pirated versions of his books from his own website. But when he bragged about this at the Burda Digital Lifestyle Design conference in Munich last January, he got in trouble with his US publisher, HarperCollins, whose then head, Jane Friedman, called him.

Friedman had caught Coelho red-handed - one of the supposedly unauthorised versions he linked to had the author's own notes in it. "She said, 'Paulo, come on, don't shit me'." He was pirating himself. So they reached a compromise: each month, a different Coelho novel can be read for free in the publisher's online reader, which prevents making pirated copies. Meanwhile Coelho is off to new digital frontiers. He Twitters. He blogs and enjoys exploring a different kind of writing online. "I think your language for your blog is totally different from your language in the Guardian, right? So we have to adapt ourselves. I have a lot of fun doing this."

When I saw him in his Paris apartment, he had a small Flip video camera ready so he could join in online video conversations at Seesmic.com. His digitally savvy assistant, Paula Bracconot, suggested having his readers take pictures of themselves reading his books, which they would put on Flickr; hundreds responded immediately. He webcasts his events and 10,000 show up online.

For his next novel, The Winner is Alone, Coelho asked his readers to help explain the pull of fashion brands. And for his last novel, The Witch of Portobello, he asked readers to film parts of the story from any character's perspective. If the results are any good, he'll have an editor turn it into a movie, The Experimental Witch.

Coelho is the thoroughly modern author. But he still believes in print. For him, this isn't a matter of print v digital. It's a question of what comes when you add digital to print. What does it bring him? "It gives me a lot of joy," he said, "because writing is something you do alone." He recalled the night in 2006 when he read that he had become the second best-selling author in the world. He was bursting. "My God, my wife is sleeping. How can I share this news with anybody?" Now he can shout it from the mountaintop of his blog.

For Coelho, digital is about relationships. The internet always is - and he is revelling in the new connections it gives him with his readers. He loves to meet them face-to-face. He mentioned on his blog that he'd like to invite a few readers to a party in a remote town in Spain and he was shocked that they were willing to fly in from as far away as Japan. Now he regularly invites readers to his parties.

"What should I do next?" he asked me in Paris. I was flummoxed because he's doing so much. Then I suggested that the next time he's in a cafe and bored, he should send a message to his fans via Twitter and his blog and I'll just bet a few will be in the neighbourhood and will drop by to share a cup of coffee. For Coelho is not just an author to them now. He's a friend.

Jeff Jarvis is a journalism professor at the City University of New York and blogs at buzzmachine.com

Aart: Your biography, written by Fernando Morais and recently published in Brasil, makes scandal because it pointed out that you had had three homosexual relations being younger. So what you think about homosexuality; about the vision of the Catholic church and others religions as well as of the political suppression concerning it in many countries?

It is not for me to judge the sexual choices of people(I wrote a book on that, “Eleven Minutes”). I had three homosexual relationships when I was 19, because my parents used to say “if you want to be an artist, this also means that you are homosexual”. They planted this doubt in my mind, and I decided to check by myself - I could never live with this interrogation mark for the rest of my life. I tried, I did not like, and I realized by then that I am not a homosexual. That said, I am convinced that people are free to choose, and sexuality, with few exceptions that involve forcing others to do something that they don’t like ( like rape and pedophily ) , is a personal choice.

Paulo Coelho
www.paulocoelhoblog.com

From Paulo Coelho, author of the international bestseller The Alchemist, comes a poignant, richly poetic story that reflects the depth of love and life.

Rarely does adolescent love reach its full potential, but what happens when two young lovers reunite after eleven years? Time has transformed Pilar into a strong and independent woman, while her devoted childhood friend has grown into a handsome and charismatic spiritual leader. She has learned well how to bury her feelings . . . and he has turned to religion as a refuge from his raging inner conflicts.

Now they are together once again, embarking on a journey fraught with difficulties, as long-buried demons of blame and resentment resurface after more than a decade. But in a small village in the French Pyrenees, by the waters of the River Piedra, a most special relationship will be reexamined in the dazzling light of some of life's biggest questions.

By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept for free:
http://browseinside.harpercollins.com/index.aspx?isbn13=9780061122095&WT.mc_id=biWidgetbe0b72e5-9136-4ced-a48a-dd5ba8091729

In this case the title of the newsletter is not right. Since in the previous Warrior of Light Online I said refused to write about the reasons why men love woman (I would be considered a male chauvinist South-American writer who despises the liberation movement of the opposite sex), a reader called Julia decided to do it for me. So now we have the feminine version of why we love women. Of course, I don't agree with everything, but this is a (relatively) free tribune. Let's see what Julia has to tell us:

We men love women because they still feel they are adolescents even after they grow old.

Because they smile every time they pass a child.

Because they walk down the street erect, always looking straight ahead, never turning round to say thanks or return the smile or compliment we make when they pass by.

Because they are bold in bed, not because they have a perverse nature but because they want to please us.

(Continue)

Paulo Coelho

www.warriorofthelight.com

By Paulo Coelho (http://www.paulocoelhoblog.com)

A very wealthy man asked a Zen master for a text which would always remind him how happy he was with his family.

The Zen master took some parchment and, in beautiful calligraphy, wrote:

- The father dies. The son dies. The grandson dies.

- What? - said the furious rich man. - I asked you for something to inspire me, some teaching which might be respectfully contemplated by future generations, and you give me something as depressing and gloomy as these words?

- You asked me for something which would remind you of the happiness of living together with your family. If your son dies first, everyone will be devastated by the pain. If your grandson dies, it would be an unbearable experience.

“However, if your family disappears in the order which I placed on the paper, this is the natural course of life. Thus, although we all endure moments of pain, the generations will continue, and your legacy will be long-lasting.”

What type of music do you listen to – classical, jazz, rock… Does your mood or feelings influence on what you want to listen to at any given moment?

Any music at any time. I am a music freak.

A favorite record, playing the radio – do these elements accompany your work? Or do you need complete silent?

Music is so powerful that I cannot write listening to anything else but the noise of my fingers in the keyboard of the computer. If I listen to music, I will be away from my desk, taken into the universe of notes and compasses.

Paulo Coelho
http://www.paulocoelhoblog.com