Pirates of the Narrow Seas Now in Print

Keibooks

P O Box 1118 * Elkton, Maryland, USA * 21922-1118

Email: Keibooks@gmail.com * WEB: www.Lulu.com/Keibooks

Date: 25 January 2010

PRESS RELEASE - For Immediate Release

Pirates of the Narrow Seas award-winning novel by M. Kei published by Keibooks

In Pirates of the Narrow Seas, Lt. Peter Thorton of the 18th century British navy must struggle to come out gay while surviving storms at sea, ship to ship battles, kidnapping and more in his quest for true love and honor. Pirates of the Narrow Seas is an expertly crafted swashbuckler brimming with authentic detail and fully realized portraits of life at sea, written by a tall ship sailor and internationally acclaimed tanka poet, M. Kei. 

"Pirates of the Narrow Seas was a dashing good tale full of adventure and mayhem"~Sage Whistler, author of 'Broken'

Perryville, Maryland — 1 February 2010 — Pirates of the Narrow Seas  by M. Kei has been published as a trade paperback by Keibooks of Perryville, Maryland. Winner of a Sweet Revolution Award in the category of 'best full cast' and a special 'Judge's Pick,' it features the nautical adventures of Lt. Peter Thorton, a gay man struggling to serve with honor during the Age of Sail. Facing numerous perils, including his fellow officers, the enemy at sea, corsairs, storms, ship battles, duels, and kidnapping, Thorton is torn between being true to himself or true to his duty to country, god, and king. 

A fan of nautical fiction by Frederick Marryat, C. S. Forester, and Patrick O'Brien, Kei was frustrated by gay characters receiving short shrift in all their novels. "Every reader wants to find a character that he can identify with and dream of a world different and better than his own. Unfortunately, they simply didn't exist. So I decided to write one for my own amusement." 

Although the inventors of Horatio Hornblower, Jack Aubrey and Richard Bolitho are more famous than Kei, he has one unique advantage: he actually crews aboard 'wooden sail.' He knows first hand the perils of having his hand accidentally pinned to the samson post with the vessel swinging out of control in a raging current and pressing wind. His personal experience of the privations, dangers, and beauty of life aboard a wooden sailing vessel creates a rich resonance as he depicts the lives and duties of 'iron men and wooden ships.' 

With a keen sense of what heroism really is, his characters overcome great challenges—not with a magic compass or animal sidekick—but with a derring-do based on real courage, skill, and intelligence. Pirates of the Narrow Seas is a spell-binding adventure in the best tradition of the sea yarn, with a main character who also happens to be gay.

Winner: Sweet Revolution Award for 'best full cast' and a special 'Judge's Pick.'

"Pirates of the Narrow Seas was a dashing good tale full of adventure and mayhem, slaves and saviors, and the rigors and perils of life at sea. Pirates of the Narrow Seas follows the life of Peter Thorton and his journey as a poor lieutenant with little social influence and dangerous secrets. I found Thorton to be a well-rounded, likable character; at times courageous and admirable and in turns despondent and pitiful. Watching him develop throughout the story; finding his true self and place in the world, made for an engaging story."~Sage Whistler, author of 'Broken'

"I've read this book several times and each time has kept me spellbound. I am not gay and I found the romance handled with such class and sensuality that I was completely enthralled and became emotionally vested in seeing the men in the book form and live through their relationships. This is all set against a compelling and highly-detailed background of history, nautical derring-do and quick-paced action. I am desperate for additional novels in this series to be released!"~Chele Kraus

Available online at <http://www.Lulu.com/Keibooks> or your favorite bookseller. Price: $18.00 USD. ISBN 978-0-557-26719-4. Trade paperback, 280 pages, 6.14" x 9.21", perfect binding, 60# cream interior paper, black and white interior ink, 100# exterior paper, full-color exterior ink. Cover art attributed to Thomas Buttersworth, modified by L. S. Alexander. International buyers may wish to utilize Amazon.com or other major bookseller. 

About the Author

M. Kei served his apprenticeship aboard a skipjack, a traditional wooden sailboat used to dredge for oysters on the Chesapeake Bay. Most recently, he has become a crewman for a square-rigged tall ship which is a reproduction of a 17th century vessel, complete with lateen mizzensail, whipstaff, watersail, and a pair of ship's cats. An accomplished poet, he is internationally known for specializing in the short lyric form known as 'tanka.' He is the editor-in-chief of Take Five : Best Contemporary Tanka and the author of Slow Motion : The Log of a Chesapeake Bay Skipjack, a log he kept in verse form while making several extended trips aboard a skipjack. Over 1500 of his short poems have been published in ten countries and six languages. He has published eight full-length books of poetry and fiction.

For media inquiries or to arrange and interview with the author, contact M. Kei through Keibooks. Email: Keibooks@gmail.com. 

About Keibooks

Keibooks is the small press founded by M. Kei to publish distinctive works of literature while allowing him full creative control. Keibooks' first project was the highly acclaimed anthology of tanka love poems, Fire Pearls : Short Masterpieces of the Human Heart, which became an instant classic and established M. Kei as an editor as well as poet of considerable ability. It was followed by his first collection of short poetry, Heron Sea, Short Poems of the Chesapeake Bay, sealing the poet's identity as a poet of the Chesapeake. Keibooks also publishes Atlas Poetica : A Journal of Poetry of Place in Modern English Tanka, an international journal that focuses on poetry of place as rendered in tanka and related forms. 

XMRV, Chronic Fatigue, and Controversy

I've been following the XMRV research in detail. Researchers at the Whittemore-Peterson Institute affiliated with the University of Nevada have identified a strong link between CFS and XMRV. Some scientists have speculated (and have clearly identified it as a speculation) that it is the cause of CFS. All scientists who have made such speculations have stressed that we are in the early stages of research and that further research is needed.

Recently they were challenged by a paper from the UK by Simon Wessly et al published in PLOSOne. PLOSOne is a CROCK. PLOSOne is a pay-to-publish site with minimal peer review. With $1365 you too can publish your science there. I went and looked up their submission guidelines and policies myself. If the authors really did good science, why didn't they publish it in a normal medical or scientific journal with rigorous standards and a robust peer review process?

That paper, which purports to find no XMRV in 186 'CFS' patients has numerous screaming flaws; the biggest one of which is that the do NOT use the same definition of 'CFS' as the WPI research. Further, there's no healthy controls in the research and they didn't search for the same DNA sequence as the WPI. In other words, it looks like science, but it isn't. If I report apples, and you search for oranges and don't find them, it's meaningless. All it really proves is that apples aren't oranges.

WPI explicitly uses the Canadian Clinical Consensus, which is the gold standard in medical description of CFS. Here's a page with links to the Canadian Consensus: http://www.cfids-cab.org/MESA/ccpc.html -- If you have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, think you might, or know somebody that does, the Canadian Clinical Consensus will be very helpful.

The UK paper does not use the Canadian consensus; they use the Oxford/CDC definition, which explicitly excludes anyone with a physical contribution to their fatigue. In other words, the WPI patients, which meet the Canadian consensus, all have demonstrable physical aspects to their illness, and therefore would not and could not be diagnosed with CFS in the UK.

The UK cohort consists of fatigued psychiatric patients, although it does excludes some psychiatric conditions as per the Fukuda definition. Note that their paper does not claim to follow the Fukuda definition, it merely claims to exclude the same exclusions that Fukuda does. Some people have said that both WPI and UK use Fukuda standards --no, the UK study does not.

Further more, the UK patients are all in routine treatment through the chronic fatigue center at Kings College. In other words, these are people who are willing to go along with a psychiatric diagnosis and treatment. People who don't benefit from psychiatric treatment or who believe their condition is physical, not mental, are not going to be members of this clinic!

Above and beyond that, the UK research did not follow the exact same procedures as the WPI research, which is essential in an replication study. The UK study also did NOT include healthy controls. Ergo, they have foregone one of the essential elements of sound scientific testing. They assert that their patients are typical of the UK -- they're not.

There's a lot of people in the UK, including scientists, who believe in a physical explanation and have produced research and documentation in support of their view. We cannot generalize from one clinic that specializes in somatoform CFS to the rest of the UK.

Not yet published is information about UK patients participating in testing who have gone through their medical doctors rather than psychiatric services. These Individuals participated in a group that sent their blood samples to the WPI to be tested. Some individuals have received their lab reports and posted their results online; they are XRMV+. This is a small number of people, so we don't know how many UK patients participated or what the over all result it, but clearly, XMRV does occur in some patients in the UK. Thus, the Wessly et al conclusion that XMRV is not in the UK is wishful thinking at best.

XMRV is known to cause disease in animals: nasty ones, such as immune and endocrine disorders, and cancer, such as lymphoma. While it is not known exactly what it does to humans, we can expect that it will do similar things to us as to other mammals. CFS patients have already been shown to have a higher risk of cancer, especially lymphoma. The symptoms of CFS (Canadian Consensus) are definitely like the symptoms of XMRV in animals. Ergo, it is plausible to suspect that it causes CFS. It remains to be be proven, but it's a promising line of research and more scientists around the world are after it.

'CFS' has been applied to a sloppy variety of conditions by many writers who choose to ignore and cherry pick the scientific evidence; but that doesn't mean that it isn't real or that XMRV is irrelevant.

The WPI researchers have proposed the name XAND for X-associated neuroimmune disorder for the Canadian consensus disease if the XRMV connection holds out. If Wessly and the other advocates of 'erroneous illness beliefs' want to hang onto CFS, let them. I'll get tested for XMRV and treated by medical doctors for XAND.

The UK paper does do one great good thing. It makes clear that two very different patient cohorts are being lumped together under the label 'CFS'. The authors appear to be unaware of that result; but once you've studied all the evidence in this and many other pieces of research, it is very clear that there are at least two different syndromes lumped together.

Of course, we already knew that. A study done in the UK by Dr. Kerr compared patients with Q fever, CFS, depression, and healthy controls. They fell into two clusters: Q fever and CFS shared many genetic anomalies (84-88), while depression and normals had very few to none (0-5).

However, nobody paid very much attention to any of the research about CFS until now. The only reason, I'm sorry to say, why this matters, is that the WPI study found that 3.7% of healthy controls were XMRV+. This finding has profound implications for the blood supply and public health. That's what made the medical establishment and government agencies sit up and take note at last. Oddly enough, they had previously ignored Japanese research that found XMRV in 2.7% of healthy controls. (This little tidbit is actually in the Wessly et al paper mentioned above!)

They're not terribly concerned about the CFS people, but they do care very much about the idea that the people who vote them into office might, say, be getting infectious cancers from the blood supply and passing them onto to others through saliva or blood... That's a nightmare scenario that must make you break out in a cold sweat if you were supposed to be a public health agency and you haven't done squat about CFS for the last 25 years...

Of course, we don't really know if that's possible, but it's not far-fetched. XMRV has been detected in saliva and blood, and is capable of transmitting infection via blood in the laboratory. Dr. Peterson in his comments at the CFSAC meeting told about a patient of his that got XMRV via blood transfusion--he has before and after blood samples.

XMRV causes cancer in animals and was discovered in connection with prostate cancer. Intimates of people with CFS are somewhat more likely than the general public to have CFS. One study of Gulf War Syndrome found that in a subset of parents with CFS, their children were much more likely to have autism.

On the other hand, German and Irish researchers have not found XMRV in prostate cancer. They have used much larger samples than the US research. Why? Some speculate that their methods are not capable of detecting it, which they vigorously deny. They prefer to speculate that XMRV is regional, and thus is found in the US but not Europe. That doesn't make much sense, either, given that viruses travel very well. Although viruses are more common in some areas than others, they still exist everywhere. On the other hand, that XMRV has been detected in Japanese and American populations does suggest another possibility: genetic susceptibility.

Japanese and Native Americans are descended from a common ancestor somewhere between 10,000 - 25,000 years ago. If XMRV or a genetic susceptibility entered the Asian genome before the population of America, people with Asian and Native American ancestry would be more likely to have XMRV than Europeans. This is not unusual; Africans are much more likely to get sickle cell anemia, for example. Still, no information has been provided about the ethnic makeup of the people who are XRMV+, so this is pure speculation. It also points out that race and ethnicity should not be ignored when conducting scientific research.

More research is under way, and more papers will be appearing over the course of the next year. It's an interesting topic with significant implications for the health of all of us.

Going to Sea

I haven't written here lately. I've been swamped with work, recovering from surgery, moving house, and various literary projects. However, I've made a big decision: I'm quitting my job at Wal-mart and going to be a substitute teacher while I look for permanent work. That will give me my weekends and evenings back, which I plan to use to volunteer with the tall ship, Kalmar Nyckel.

I have been accepted as a volunteer and tentatively accepted for sail training. Assuming I can afford it, I'll be taking the summer off to crew on the Kalmar Nyckel. I'm very excited and looking forward to it, I can tell you that!

Meanwhile, January will be devoted to finishing Atlas Poetica : A Journal of Poetry of Place in Modern English Tanka (5) with the kind help of Alex von Vaupel's technical assistance. It will appear in March. I will also be finishing Take Five : Best Contemporary Tanka, Vol. 2, which will appear in print in April.

I have also decided to put the Pirates of the Narrow Seas novels into print via a self-publishing POD arrangement; I need cover art, but otherwise PoNS 1 is mostly laid out.

In short, I'm going to be very busy in a good way. The downside is that I won't have much money, but sometimes you have to make sacrifices to do the things you want to do. The choice is between being poor and happy and poor and unhappy, so the decision is pretty simple. Since Wal-mart has changed its insurance to be so bad, the difference between having insurance and not having insurance isn't that great. It will only matter in the event of a catastrophe. Here's hoping for no catastrophes, eh?

I am also looking for a laptop or tablet computer that I can do serious writing on, access the Internet, do email while aboard the ship. It needs long battery life and to be rugged enough to survive conditions at sea -- saltwater humidity is notoriously bad for electronics. Preferably a Mac (looking forward to seeing what the new Mac tablet looks like). We stick to the coast so a cell phone link as opposed to a satellite link is probably sufficient, although I might look into the satellite cost for the summer only.

Looking back on my sailing career, I have only crewed on wooden boats. I have been a passenger on a few other vessels, but I'm probably one of the last people in the world that learned to sail on a wooden workboat. The Kalmar Nyckel sail training program is well-regarded, and graduates of the program work on a variety of other tall ships. With a little luck, perhaps I will be able to change my career to tall ship sailor. If so, I will be able to make a living writing poetry and sailing old wooden vessels. Wouldn't that be a dream come true?