The New York Times pronounces. Twice.

The New York Times Book Review ran the briefest of reviews for the US paperback of A Vengeful Longing on Sunday. Except that in the print edition they reviewed my earlier Porfiry Petrovich novel, The Gentle Axe, under the title of A Vengeful Longing. The online edition of the supplement carried the correct review, and this correction:

A brief description in the Paperback Row column on Page 16 this weekend, about “A Vengeful Longing,” by R. N. Morris (Penguin, $15), was published in error. It describes a previous book by the same author. A correct description of “A Vengeful Longing” follows:

In this sequel to “The Gentle Axe” — “CSI: St. Petersburg,” our reviewer, Liesl Schillinger, called it — Morris returns to the city in the late 1860s. His protagonist, once again, is Porfiry Petrovich, who solved Raskolnikov’s crime in Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment.” Here, Petrovich discovers a link between three apparently unrelated murders in a book that is richly evocative of its time and place.

Ellen Meister, the author of The Smart One and Secret Confessions of the Applewood PTA, who is a friend of mine from the writing website zoetrope.com, very kindly scanned in the print edition, which carries the mistaken review:

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.