Brighton Festival draws near

This year's Brighton Festival takes place from 2-24 May. For the first time ever, it has a guest curator - the Turner award-winning artist Anish Kapoor. Of course, in this current economic climate there is less money around for the arts than ever, especially in Scotland, it seems, with the hard-hit Scottish banks withrawing their sponsorship. However, according to this blog piece in the Telegraph by Rupert Christiansen, the Brighton Festival doesn't seem to have fared too badly in the financial squeeze. In fact, in his opinion, this year's programme is shaping up to be the best ever.

That's reassuring to hear, especially as I have worked on a piece that is going to form a part of this year's festival programme. It's the opera, Cocteau in the Underworld, for which I've written the libretto. The composer is Ed Hughes.

A workshop production of Cocteau in the Underworld will take place in the Pavilion Theatre on Monday 4 May at 9.00pm. It will be pretty much self-contained, but is not the complete opera. In fact, it represents about half of the piece and should take about 35 minutes.

There's more about the Brighton Festival here.

More about Cocteau in the Underworld here.

New website

Here.

View from Here interview part two

I think it must be the longest, most in-depth interview I have ever done! Part Two is here.

Part one, if you want to read that first, is here.

Jen Persson of View from Here also reviewed A Vengeful Longing here.

I feel like I am rather hogging the view over there.

But if that's not enough for you, Alex at Faber spotted another review in Eurocrime.

The Page 69 Test

Michael Gregorio, aka Mike Jacob and Daniela de Gregorio, has undertaken the page 69 test with their new novel, A Visible Darkness, which is published today in the USA. You will note my confusion as to whether to treat them as a single entity (Michael Gregorio) or as two individuals (which is what they are). Hence my grammatical inconsistency.

I'd say they passed with flying colours.

The Inter-view from here

Part one of an interview with the literary magazine The View From Here is here.

Part two will be there soon.

Thanks to Jen for some great questions.

New opera trailer

A new edit of the opera trailer has been posted on youtube. It's subtly different from the last.



May 4 - the date of the Brighton performance - approaches! Book here, now. Please.

A fellow traveller in Twit Land

I'm truly in awe of Brazilian author Claudio Soares, who is not only serialising his novel Santos Dumont número 8 on twitter, but has set up twitter streams for each of his main characters!

The book is in Brazilian Portuguese, as is the twitterisation, but you can read about his experiment in English in this smashwords blog post.

The novel itself sounds wonderful, and I hope he finds an English publisher for it (anyone at Faber or Penguin paying attention????).

Here's the Santos Dumont número 8 twitter page for the serialisation.

Yet another edit of the trailer!

Twimbo

It's holiday time here. Which means the kids are off school and semi-cluttering up the house. Actually, one of them is doing a music course, which runs more or less usual school hours and the other is no trouble at all. So I can't really blame them for my lack of productivity. But I have to confess I am not at my most productive at the moment.

It's not as if I don't have something to work on. I do. A nice project, actually, a longish short story. Or maybe it's a shortish long story. I haven't decided yet. I have no definite deadline for it though, and maybe that is the problem.

In the meantime I am waiting to hear back from my editor about the edits I did on my new manuscript. I think it's that, really, that's preventing me from getting on with anything. Until I know what's happening there my writing life is slightly suspended.

Of course, there is the daily, hourly, feeding of the twitter beast. Or perhaps that should be 'tweast' following the apparent trend (sorry, I mean 'twend') of taking perfectly good words and bastardising them by replacing their initial letters with 'tw'.

It can produce some interesting coinages - or should that be twoinages?

There's twiction, and twitterature, of course, which have been used to describe my own particular experiment on twitter (twexperiment?). Others have also come to my attention: twistory, twictures, twelephone, twexy, twoddle, twonsense, twiresome and twen-will-it-all-stwop?

Then again, I may just be twitting you.

Interview with Preston Writing Network.

Jenn Ashworth is a Preston-based writer whose debut novel A Kind of Intimacy has received to-die-for critical acclaim. (In fact, the Guardian reviewer asked: "... who wouldn't kill for a comic gift like Jenn Ashworth's?") Jenn runs a blog for writers in her neck of the woods, called the Preston Writing Network, and she very kindly interviewed me for the site.

American paperback trailer

Ahead of the publication of the American paperback of A Vengeful Longing, which comes out in May, here is a slightly edited version of the trailer to include the name of my American publisher, Penguin.

More on twitterature

The Daily Beast has run another piece on twitterature, which has been picked up by lots of other bloggers, including The Huffington Post! I see that yahoo also included it in their Daily Buzz bulletin.

I was also mentioned in this introduction to the whole topic on squidoo.

The only question I'm left with after reading all this is should it be Twit-Lit or Twitterature?

Either way I suppose I have to keep going now!

Detective Dumpty and the Murder Myster-yolk.

It's that time again. The egg decorating contest at my kids' school. This year my son and his friend did a joint effort, which was all their own idea without any influence from me I promise: the theme they chose was Detective Dumpty and the Murder Myster-yolk. The picture only represents half of their endeavour as the background, which included a forensic tent and a perpetrator hiding in a bush, was not available for me to photograph.



You will notice that that is an axe sticking out from the victim's broken shell.

My daughter and her friends went for a slightly more surreal theme, which as far as I can tell was based on the idea that 'Eggs are strange'. The scene was offered as evidence of this, depicting as it does some eggs eating breakfast in a bathroom. It's pretty deep.

Mack captures social networking

Mack Lundy, who blogs as Mack Captures Crime, is running a series on the way authors use social networking and the internet in general. He's written a piece about my efforts. I'm pleased to say that Mack is one of those who is enjoying my twitterisation of A Gentle Axe.

Spot the difference...

Between the US hardback of A Vengeful Longing and the US paperback, due out May 26:

Digitalist digs twitterisation

The digitalist is a blog by the digital team at Pan Macmillan and they were kind enough to mention my twitter experiment in a favourable way: "Reading it in my twitter feed each day is a fantastic experience."

I've also noticed a brief mention in the influential galleycat blog. I was very flattered to discover that my "link-filled look at Twitter writing can help guide us as we march into the microblogging future". Ha!

Less enthusiastic is Ian Hocking, who found my sentences "curiously ordinary". Ian makes some good points about the importance of context in storytelling. I suppose in my defence, what I would say is that I am not really expecting this to deliver the same level of satisfaction as reading a traditional narrative. You could say that receiving tweets about what people you've never met had for lunch, or from celebrities waiting for their next shoot to begin, is not as satisfying as a night out with your mates. As a means of communication, twittering is necessarily disrupted and disconnected. That's part of its charm - or its irritation, depending on your point of view.

I suppose the interesting question might be not how my tweets compare to the traditional way of publishing a novel, but how they compare to other tweets. I was contacted by one person who said that for them tweets have to be personal, and therefore their use as a narrative vehicle is not effective. But I have had others contact me telling me how much they are enjoying the tweets - and that they like them because they are different to most other tweets. One person at least has bought a copy, albeit of the Kindle edition! A sign of the times maybe.

Despite Ian's and others' misgivings, I am going to stick with the experiment. I'm not really sure what I'm doing or why, but now that I have begun it seems important to see it through to the end!

View the latest epitweet (or should that be tweetisode?) here.

New audiotrack for the trailer

Voiceover provided by John Curless, taken from the audiobook of A Vengeful Longing:

Adventures in Twit Lit

Okay, I admit it. It's a mad idea. Serialising a whole novel on twitter. But there is something about the experiment that appeals to me on a creative/communicative level. Inevitably it has led to a fair bit of head shaking of the 'what is the world coming to' variety.

There was this in a Miami Herald blog. "Oh the temptation to start raging about the idiocy of new technology is strong..." Well, rage if you like. But what about print newspapers with online bloggers attached? Couldn't that be seen as another way that new technology is changing the way we receive information. Far be it from me to decry that as 'idiocy'.

Blogbook dismisses it as a publicity stunt, and a failed one at that. I admit that part of my motivation was to try and attract new readers to my books. Guilty as charged. We writers do not have the massive budgets spent on advertising that a new blockbuster film has, for example. So we have to do what we can. That said, I was interested in how this way of receiving text differs as a reading experience from sitting down and reading a book.

It's true, getting a sentence or a fragment every hour - that's how I am now scheduling my tweets - is not like sitting down and reading an extended section of the book through. You won't necessarily remember what went before. The text will work on the reader in a different way - but I am interested to see just how.

I like the way my sentences pop up every hour. It's interesting for me, as the writer, to see them like that in isolation. They take on, if not a different meaning, then a different power - stranger, more enigmatic.

Not all the coverage has been negative. Hannah Rudman seems to talk a lot of sense about twitter here. Whilst the Daily Beast includes me in a round-up of something it calls Twit Lit in a discussion on the Future of Publishing. Twit Lit, hmmm. Not sure I like that, but I suppose it was too hard to resist.

And not all of the coverage has been in English either. I even made the literary news in France.

Meanwhile, the twitterisation continues. New followers join here.

Trailer for A Vengeful Longing

Bookseller shows interest in twitterisation

Here.

To follow, go here.