And hello

I never did get round to writing about poetry, or philosophy, or classical literature, or that bizarre year I ended up working as a gigolo in Montana. On the other hand, I didn’t expect to write 35,000 words. That’s a long novella, or a modest guidebook to Wales.

And my cunning plan[1] to do all my publicity from the comfort of this chair was not wholly successful.

Apart from doing the inevitable round of interviews for Coming Down the Mountain[2], I did a signing using Margaret Atwood’s patented Long Pen contraption, whereby I sat at a desk in London and signed books for readers in Toronto, doodling my signature with a light pen on a tablet PC, then watching my doodles being replicated by a robotic arm at the far end. One of the odder publicity experiences so far.

I did a talk at the London Book Festival, but (being moronic) only realised the night before the event that the London Book Festival was run by Reed Elsevier who also run arms fairs. Along with many other writers I had signed a letter of protest about this grisly and unethical link (selling books to people, and selling weapons to kill them) the previous year. Consequently the only way of making up for my brainless hypocrisy was to add a statement of protest to my talk, which I duly did, and which I was planning to paste here in perpetuity until I heard that Reed Elsevier had announced that they were giving up their arms fair portfolio. A small and vain part of me would like to think that I was the straw that broke the camel’s back. In truth, I suspect that I was a beetle the camel trod on shortly before its back broke.

I also appeared at the Sydney Writer’s Festival via a satellite link. This involved sitting in a studio in BBC Oxford at 1:00 in the morning talking to a camera. Unnervingly, I couldn’t see the interviewer or the audience at the far end. More unnervingly still, a technical fault meant that I was visible for the first twenty minutes of the event but unable to hear anything. The BBC engineer finally put the interviewers through a speakerphone on the far side of the studio. It was no a very loud speakerphone and I could only hear portions of what she was saying, on which subjects I then extemporised into a vacuum. This was odder, even than the Long Pen. It is possible that the audience thought I was on drugs.

Anyway…

The appropriate thing, at this point, would doubtless be to round everything off with some kind of conclusive fanfare. But that seems counter to the whole spirit of the enterprise, which is that you can select any entry from the enticing list of headings in that column on the right, then toggle through a few more before going back to the New York Times online or that weird nun blog you were reading.

If you have arrive here after all the entries have been posted then this is the first thing you’re going to see. In which case… welcome. And browse.

Me, I have a novel that needs writing.

[1]See The Joy of Publicity Pt. 1.
[2]See See, strangely enough, Coming Down the Mountain..