New trailer for Cocteau in the Underworld

This is the new trailer for the opera Cocteau in the Underworld. The footage was shot at the Brighton performance in May. The trailer was put together by the film maker David Newell.



If you can't see the video, possibly because you're using a mozilla firefox browser, you can watch it on Youtube, here.

What you get when you win a New Covey Trailer Award

More details here.

Red room features my cat

The writers' site Red Room has pulled out the video of me struggling with my writing demon, or cat, and featured it on their homepage. It seems they think my pain is entertaining.

And the winner is...

My trailer for A Vengeful Longing was picked as the best author-produced trailer in the monthly New Covey Trailer Awards for May. Chuffed, I am.

Twuffer's gone mad

Apologies to all my twitter followers. It seems that the application I use to schedule my tweets has gone mad. I set it up to send out an instalment every hour, but it has been bombarding people with tweets in strange clusters. I think it's probably lost me a few followers, who are getting hacked off with the inundation.

Possibly this could be the end of the experiment. I can't contend with the technology issues. For one thing, the tweets I scheduled were meant to keep the story going over a couple of days, but twuffer has spewed them all out at once. So all that work entering them has effectively gone to waste, plus the ill will that it has probably created is very unfortunate.

We shall have to see, but I don't seem to be able to get into twuffer to see what's going on, or to correct it.

Bookhuggers unite!

There's a new website called bookhuggers, which I think is well worth a look. Okay, I'll declare an interest. I'm on it. I've taken part in a 'virtual panel' about crime writing - exploring both the factual and fictional varieties. The other panellists are Armand Cabasson, a psychiatrist and novelist working in the North of France, and Jay Dobyns, an ATF undercover agent (!!!) who infiltrated the Hells Angels after faking a murder (even more exclamation marks!!!!!!!).

Check it out here.

The guilty one

This was the line-up in the Waterstones Islington shop window. That's me on the right. The guilty one. I was caught red-handed inside the shop taking the photo below - a picture of my book, A Vengeful Longing, on display, complete with a bookseller's recommendation. "Excuse me, we don't allow photographs of the displays!" came the cry from the sales assistant. "But it's my book!" I pleaded. She softened. Smiled. "Oh that's different," she said.

I pointed to myself in the line-up poster as proof. "See, that's me."

"We'll do our best for you," she promised.

Here's the offending shot, which I was not made to delete: