All The Underrated Absolute Legends Who Made Us Feel Great When We Were Alive
June is turning out to be a busier month than anticipated: a few things clicked into place, I fended off my recent spate of creative block, stopped staring self-defeatingly at my fig tree like a bearded 21st-Century Esther Greenwood and really got motoring on novel number four. I've also just finished my edit on my new short story collection and sent it to the copy editor (it's making me a bit itchy, to say the least, that I can't show you the cover of this yet, but it should be only a few days now). This week I have two unexpectedly sold-out talks to plan for, in Bristol and Bridport, and the paperback of Everything Will Swallow You is making its way into smaller UK bookshops for its special early Independent Bookshop Week publication. If you're not in the UK, want to read it, and can't pick it up from one of those/nag them to stock it, I'd appreciate if you put in a pre-order from Blackwell's for the book's official July 2nd release. Blackwell's do free international delivery, and when pre-sales look healthy it really helps persuade more shops to stock the book. Not that I'm expecting EWSY - or wanting it - to make me the new Coleen Nolan. I'm happy being beneath success and do not think it would suit me if I wasn't. But I do want my books to have longevity, to stay in print and sell enough to keep me writing forever, and I strongly believe that comes from grass roots word of mouth and human connection, not industry "buzz" or budget.
Far more importantly, though, we now appear to have a herring gull living in our spare room. Jim has been expressing chequered feelings about this.
Here's another new story - the final one I just wrote for my upcoming collection - which I'm sharing as a sneak preview for paying subscribers. It costs less than half a pint of lager - and that even includes northern lager - to read (which will also give you access to my full archive and everything else new I post) and is called All The Underrated Absolute Legends Who Made Us Feel Great When We Were Alive...
