Brian’s been released into the wild, with analogue and digital versions on the shelves and available online.
Big thanks to the Sandstone Press team for the graft and love they’ve put in.
First review
… takes aspects of many genres and combines them with staccato sentences that punch with such precision that the experience of reading the novel borders on the delirious. Quite simply, The Folded Man reads like Coetzee with ADHD.
Dan Ellis, probably better known as @utterbiblio, has written a belting review of THE FOLDED MAN for Litro magazine. Dan gets right into the guts of the book (bad language, aggression and nastiness included) and comes out the other side with some very lovely stuff to say. ‘Chuffed to bits’ doesn’t really cover it.
A wild book appears
For a smallish lump of squashed, sliced, graffitied tree, this beautiful-looking thing causes one of the weirdest feelings. Or even twelve of them at the same time: chufties, relief, embarrassment, hope, fear, pride, anxiety, awkwardness, gratefulness, nakedness, bewilderment, gratitude.
To be honest I’m still waiting for Jeremy Beadle to bob over and show me where all the hidden cameras are. But if he doesn’t show up, there will be wine. So come and help me launch the bugger at Waterstones Deansgate, Manchester on 16th May, or Daunt Books Holland Park, London on 22nd May. I’ll be there, pretending as though I have a single clue what I’m doing.
Paris
Our films and photos paint this city from the same place a million times over; every single shot identical from every last angle. (Mine included.)
But it’s such a shame you can’t photograph the smell of it. Not just the food and the wine – the cigarette smoke, the piss rolling out from the corners, the perfume, the sweat and the dirt of the Metro.
It’s my favourite city – a spire’s tip beyond Manchester; a Trocadéro garden ahead of London.
I couldn’t tell you why, though. I just know I’d probably write more about it if every word you could possibly write about Paris wasn’t already on paper.
Seven more ways to fool yourself into writing
Pretty much exactly two years ago I wrote a little post about nine things you can do to get yourself in the mood for writing.
It’s taken about that long to think up some more. But since writing is like MRSA – grows resilient to the same old tactics, and then kills you with cigarettes, alcohol, or collapsing shelves, depending on how successful you are – I reckon it’s good to stay on your toes.
So: here are seven more ways to trick yourself into writing.
Don’t tell anyone what you’re writing
You know those things you do when nobody looks? That you’d criticise someone for doing if you caught them?
I mean things like picking your nose, or fiddling around with your genitals.
That’s how writing should be.
Writing should be a dirty little habit that no one catches you doing. That makes you feel a bit good and a bit naughty and even a bit shameful if it’s truthful. Writing isn’t meant to be glamorous. It’s a process. It’s like rolling around in tonnes of letter-y shit for months on end. So be the pig, stop worrying if it doesn’t feel amazing all the time, and get stuck in.
2013
New year. New blog. So no one says.
Some rum bugger hacked the last site and made a dog’s dinner of the back-end. So I’ve smartened things up and got this one sorted to take its place.
Here’s a nice picture I took in Snowdonia, New Year’s Day.
Happy 2013.
Next
Sandstone Press label-mate Zoe Venditozzi, whose just-published novel ANYWHERE’S BETTER THAN HERE you should definitely read (and whose surname I can never spell right the first time), tagged me in that Next Big Thing writers’ meme doing the rounds. About a month ago.
At the risk of giving everyone FOLDED MAN fatigue – no known cure – with five months still left before publication, I’ve only just got round to putting them up here. Sorry Zoe.
What’s the working title of your next book?
These days it’s called THE FOLDED MAN. Which I’ve rammed down enough throats already. But at one point it was called THE BRITTLE MERMAID, which was too obvious and made it all sound a bit Robert Rankin.
Where did the idea come from for the book?
Not in rivers of inspiration, but in those drips you can hear from the bathroom tap at 3am.
I think I caught bits from one of those awful manipulative documentaries about a girl born with Sirenomelia (mermaid syndrome), which the novel’s main character has. A person I knew in real life who’d lived with his disabilities for a long time. And Manchester itself, its history and its characters, and all the little contradictions and quirks that you learn flitting between the hub-towns and the city centre itself. And then some dodgy fringe politics, conspiracies. Too much time on the internet.
