I'm awful at blogging

I'm back. For someone who's had a LiveJournal since 2002 or something, I sometimes have a bit of a mental block when it comes to blogging. Who am I actually talking to? Does anyone actually read this stuff?

Things have been very busy for me, though. As I mentioned in my last post, I appeared in a charity production of Black Comedy which did very well indeed. Sold-out run, more or less (by the final night, they were bringing extra chairs into the auditorium to try and avoid turning too many people away), big laughs, and I felt the benefit of a director who reined me in a bit - avoiding the 'usual Jack-in-a-box' performance that Darrol Blake occasionally laments when I bounce on to the stage.

I then got back to writing, and it all kicked off a bit. I completed submissions for three or four anthologies and put down about 10,000 words of not-bad prose on Detective Daintypaws:1. 

I get bored saying it, because it always goes wrong, but it does look as though there should be a bit of a flurry of new books featuring my work in the second half of 2016. How many of these actually materialise remains to be seen, of course.

Life is settling down, after the crazy wedding shenanigans of last year. We have a dog, and he needs walking twice a day regardless of our plans, and that imposes a kind of structure on our lives which I think we find quite useful in a way. I find it hard to get a lot of writing done, unless I have a deadline in which case I can make time for a couple of days or so. That's fine for short stories, but I need to find more general room for the written word in my life if I'm ever going to step up to producing novels on a reasonably regular basis.

Flash Fear is now out, a collection of (very) short horror stories which includes my Prey For The Dead. An ebook version is forthcoming, apparently.

So this is a rambling bunch of nonsense, but hopefully just posting it and getting the monkey off my back will make it easier to come up with the next post. Until the next time.

Theatrical Interlude

I'm now halfway through a run as Brindsley Miller in Black Comedy at the OSO in Barnes. A community theatre project aiming to raise money for local charities, this brilliant production has given me the opportunity to act opposite my wife (playing Carol Melkett), and I've been learning a lot about reining in my impulse to chase the laughs.

Not pictured: chaotic hijinks and hilarious consequences

As these things always tend to come along in threes, like buses, I also did a rehearsed reading of a friend's brilliant play at the Arcola's Playwrought festival of new writing last week. Oh, and Grimm & Grimmer came out, featuring my short story The Frag Prince.

After the final show on Saturday 5 March, I think I'll be taking a break from the stage, unless I'm lucky enough to be asked to do Tortoise again. I've now got a good half dozen writing projects which have been on hold since New Year, and I need to get back in the author's chair!

Tickets are now very limited, but if you're in London and fancy some classic comedy, www.ticketsource.co.uk/bcp will sort you right out.

13 Minutes

13 Minutes, by Sarah Pinborough

I have a day job where I run the advertising on a very large magazine, that has a small book review section. This book came in, among dozens of others but the editorial team passed on it. So I took it, because I like Sarah's stuff and I was a bit sad that we didn't get it in the magazine. My disclaimer would be something along the lines of "Some people I work with received a free advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. But they didn't fancy it, so you got me instead." Still, it's not as bad as the time a small press publisher tried sending one of my books in!

Early one winter's morning, a popular, attractive, intelligent sixth form student is pulled from the river. Natasha is resuscitated after spending 13 minutes being dead. Her best friends are acting suspiciously, and she received a mysterious text message in the middle of the night.

With no memory of the preceding eighteen hours or so, Natasha and her childhood best friend Rebecca rekindle their relationship as they start investigating the incident. While also worrying about boyfriends, playing chess, and working on the school's drama production of The Crucible. How could perfect Natasha have ended up in the freezing water? And what are her friends failing to tell her?

Sarah Pinborough captures perfectly the shifting alliances, insecurities and rivalries of teenage life, while never descending into stereotypes - the "needy" girlfriend turns out to have pretty good reasons for being clingy where her older boyfriend is concerned, for example. Creating five fully-developed and believable teenage female characters is no mean feat, and when most of their parents also pop up in significant supporting roles, not to mention the police, teachers and other adult cast, you're left with a packed guest cast.

While partly a study in how vile teenage girls can be to each other, 13 Minutes is mostly a thriller, however, and it is constructed tightly. Not a single comment in Natasha's diary is superfluous, not a single plot detail is extraneous (even if it turns out to be a red herring later). The fact that the girls are involved in a production of The Crucible resonates with the plot sometimes, and serves to misdirect the reader at other times.

With any thriller aimed at the YA market, a jaded adult can probably spot the odd plot development before it hits. Sarah's masterstroke is to signal some of her jabs just enough to make them satisfying for readers of any age, whether you predicted them or not, before hitting you with the next twist. "Didn't see that coming, did you, smartarse?" you can almost see her saying.

The girls drink, smoke, take drugs, shag, and are eye-wateringly catty to each other. This is very far from being an idealised depiction of young adulthood, and the plausible use of social media and messaging throughout (a notable Achilles heel for many a writer) adds up to a thoroughly modern novel.

13 Minutes is a gripping, funny and closely observed book that has been crafted to perfection. Everything is both not as it seems, and exactly as described. The book rewards careful reading, re-reading, and deserves to be a smash hit for a very hard-working writer at the height of her powers.

Casanova: The Story Of My Escape. Get It While It's Cheap!

The Story Of My Escape is my most popular and enduring book to date. Casanova (yes, that Casanova) is partying in Venice, when the Inquisition lock him up in The Leads, a notorious prison in the lead-lined roof of the Doge's Palace on St Mark's Square. After 15 months of vermin, illness, boredom, fear, and insanity brought on by reading a bad book, the libertine attempts the most audacious and flamboyant escape in history.

If everything you think you know about Casanova comes from a certain TV serial starring David Tennant then, yes, the book covers the bit when Casanova was locked in prison for five minutes before hearing some bad news about his girlfriend and punching his way out through the wall. The full story is... somewhat more convincing (but still not necessarily entirely true).

It's a brilliant book, a truly marvellous book, and I was staggered to discover it had never been made widely available in English before. At the suggestion of Kate Orman, I translated it from French myself (though Italian, Casanova tended to write in French in order to reach a bigger audience. I surmise from this that he would only have approved of my attempt to render his tale in English).

In the two years that the book has been available, it's sold several hundred copies all around the world, in e-book and paperback. If my interest was purely commercial, I'd be a fairly satisfied self-published author with a modest success in my catalogue.

But I have delusions of scholarship, and I feel this is an important book. The moment I began receiving emails from people thanking me for finally publishing a text for which they'd been searching for years, and from people who letting me know how much they'd enjoyed reading it after completing the Secret Tour of the Doge's Palace and seeing Casanova's actual cells (a trip I've still not made myself!), I knew this book needed to get out of the self-publishing ghetto and in front of as many readers as possible.

People need to read this book, to discover what a witty, ruthless, brilliant man Casanova could be, to be entertained by his philosophical reflections, which can switch from thoughts on bravery and honour to urine within a couple of paragraphs, and back again. In the course of this book, Casanova is as broken as anyone can be by both mental and physical illness, but still bounces back to leave a snotty note for his jailers before breaking out of his cell. The French edition was a huge bestseller across Europe in the late 18th Century. It's been a long time reaching the English market, but now it's here I want people to read it.

To that end, the e-book is currently on sale at just £0.99 / $0.99 on Amazon, until Tuesday 16 February, and is being heavily promoted around the interwebs. Enjoy The Story Of My Escape.

New year, new look, new content

Welcome to the latest version of this occasional blog. I've added some pages, including an index of my published books, and details of my sporadic acting adventures. I'm going to try and update the blog more often. Weekly would be great, but let's not get our hopes up...

So what's new?

Last year I got married, twice, and we acquired a supernaturally naughty cocker spaniel puppy. I also made my West End debut, and acted as an extra in a film and a TV drama. My scene was cut from the film (Florence Foster Jenkins, if you must know, coming out later this year), but never mind.

I also self-published a few new books last year, and all the activity on this blog is, I must admit, an indication that there are to be a few new releases in the not too distant future.

I'll be doing my best to keep the blog fairly entertaining, with sales links kept to a minimum. Like this one for my Casanova translation. That wasn't too bad, was it?

I'll also be posting the odd book review, along with contact details if you would like me to review your work. Just as soon as I decide whether I think that's a good idea. The next review will almost certainly be 13 Minutes by Sarah Pinborough, and I basically have a month not only to write that post, but also to post a whole bunch of other stuff to put a bit of clear digital water between that and my praise for The Death House so I don't look like a sycophant!

Happy times and places.

The Death House

Sarah Pinborough seems to be taking a social media break, probably to get on with writing marvellous books, so I can sneak in and say that The Death House is absolutely freaking awesome without getting all embarrassed about being fanboyish, and also without letting on that it took me six months to get round to reading it.

Stephen King thinks it's awesome, so my tuppence is hardly required, but anyway. It's a great book that needs bracketing alongside The Lion The Witch & The Wardrobe, The Hobbit, and particularly Lord of the Flies as a timeless children's classic (or YA, whatever, but that wasn't really a thing when the other three were written).

From a writering point of view, world-building obsessives should take note of the highly broad strokes with which Pinborough paints the society and sequence of events that leads to the young Defectives being sent away to the Death House, and its mysteries that are never entirely solved. As with Lord of the Flies, from which this technique is most obviously familiar, the story is everything, and wider exposition is dripped in miserly doses only when it's absolutely necessary.

And what a story. Pinborough is a former teacher, and as William Golding proved with Lord of the Flies, that does seem to help creating truly realistic adolescent characters. As the cast of children while away their days waiting for their symptoms to develop, the conflicts, bonds, lies and coping mechanisms all ring true.

And the ending, oh dear. Certain plot developments are abundantly clear to readers, long before the characters catch on, reinforcing the idea that we're reading about frightened and confused children who are forced to pretend to be adults as they confront their mortality. In spite of me being Mr Smuggypants Smug Reader, however, the closing chapters quite simply blew me away, and I cried. And I don't cry at books. Or anything. 22 August 2015 was a baking hot day in the UK, so it was just eye-sweat, I tell you.

Do yourself a favour and get hold of it in whichever format you think you prefer: The Death House.

Coming Soon...

"Andrew, where can I buy more of your fantastic writing?" This is what my cat keeps asking me, in a voice that sounds suspiciously like my own falsetto, as I bounce her up and down on her hind legs like an excitable fan.

If you are of the same opinion as my cat (and I'm frankly starting to question her sincerity so do let me know if you are), you'll be aroused to learn that there are in fact three tomes that contain my written contributions, coming soon to a bookshop near you. If there are any bookshops left near you, that is.

Please note I don't have solid release dates for any of the below, so I'm posting these according to the order I think they're likely to be released. Check back in five years and see if I was right!

Flash Fear (KnightWatch Press)
Prey For The Dead is my contribution to this anthology of horror-themed flash fiction. Originally submitted as part of a website relaunch, this chapbook-style release looks like a lot of fun.

(This book doesn't even exist yet and it's already got my favourite cover yet of anything I've ever been published in)

Grimm & Grimmer: 4 (Fringeworks Press)
The Frag Prince is my contribution to this fourth volume of re-imagined and updated fairy tales. It's a rare example of actual science-fiction from me. This book has been a heroically long time coming, so I'm very excited that it looks like it's about to land.

(This lovely cover does actually remind me of a joke more horrible than anything that's likely to be in the book, but still...)

A Time Lord For Change (Chinbeard Books)
This charity collection is going to be brilliant, I'm so thrilled to be part of it. Raising money for mental health causes, A Time Lord For Change contains one drabble (short story of exactly 100 words, fact fans) inspired by Every. Single. Televised. Doctor Who. Story. And quite a bunch of spin-off stories across various media. I think I'm allowed to say that I've done the drabbles for Caves of Androzani and Survival.

The other writers contributing to this book is just a list of phenomenal awesomeness. There are some true stars from Doctor Who fandom, the stable of Doctor Who's professional authors, and some world-class writers who just happen to love the show.

(Yes, I did put the picture in correctly, the above tease is all that's been released publicly of the cover)

Gosh.
It's all pretty cool, though it won't keep my voraciously literate cat satiated for long. I'd better keep typing. Look out for some zombies and other stuff in the not too distant future.