The Buddha and the Big Bad Wolf cover

          I finished editing the scan of Are You Boys Cyclists a few days ago, so it'll be up on Kindle in a week or so. It's a long time since I read it and I wasn't looking forward to it, but I actually quite enjoyed it. It's a true account of my time as an amateur boxer and it is a memoir of writing books and plays, if a somewhat jaundiced one. The rest of the book is made up of graphic sex and I'd find it difficult to recommend to anyone under eighty. At one point in the book it says it's like a combination of Henry Miller, Charles Bukowski and Kurt Vonnegut, but some of it is funny. If you don't mind a lot of bad language and plenty of sexual depravity, you might like it.
          I got a £1000 advance from Serpent's Tail for that novel and used it to go on a hapless Buddhist pilgrimage to India and Nepal. It didn't quite turn out to be the pilgrimage I was hoping for!! I'll write more about these books when they are uploaded by the consigliere, who will be a wee bit busy with family matters for a week or so.
          Anyway, my wonderful daughter has come up with these covers. I fancied the top one, but I've been told that the writing isn't as clear on it. We'll probably go with the blue one.
          Are You Boys Cyclists, The Buddha and The Big Bad Wolf and TheBlissBook are written in a similar style and as a group I do like them. They are all semi-autobiographical (like Alma Mater) and all of them have something to say about being a writer.
          Alma Mater hasn't made a sale yet, but In The Land Of The Demon Masters made it's first sale today or yesterday. Remote Control hasn't made a sale yet, but I was contacted yesterday by a publisher about it. I'm not expecting that to come to anything, but it was good that someone even noticed it since I haven't done anything to market them except mention them on a couple of discussion threads.

The Real McCoy

          This is my favourite piece of writing. There will be ten books uploaded to Kindle over this spring and summer of  2011, but if I had to choose just one to survive, it would be The Real McCoy!

          When City Whitelight was being published by Mainstream Publishing, I was asked by my radio producer for a drama with a strong narrative line, so I adapted City Whitelight. I was always more interested in writing prose, but I was making money from writing scripts and I did try to combine these things. I would write books I couldn't get published and then adapt them for radio dramas.

           It was slightly different with The Real McCoy. The radio drama producer, Patrick Rayner, wanted  me to write something for radio and not adapt something. Also, at the time the studios in Queen Street were going to be out of operation for a year and the play would have to be done in London. Everything that I'd written so far for radio drama had been very Scottish and when the studios were mothballed, I thought that in London they must have Americans! Wonderful American voices!
   
          So I'm sitting with a few beers on holiday in Yugoslavia, and I'm thinking who would I like to be in this radio drama. Start a list. Albert Einstein. Albert Schweitzer. Sigmund Freud. Jesus Christ. God. My girlfriend was six months pregnant and this was the best of times. I thought I'd write a radio script and then write the novel.

         In London they have wonderful American voices!! The guy who played the commander who freaks out in Aliens played Jacob Merryweather. There was talent all the way through that production. Very clever actors indeed!

         I loved writing that novel. It had a lot in it about American politics. I read American history for three out of my four years at university. I've only ever been to America for a fortnight, but I do love it. American actors and writers and all of that. It would be a great place to live in if you had lots of money. Anyway, so I'm writing this satire of American politics and I'm doing it in the only time since I was thirty when I could write like a professional writer.  I had three months when my girlfriend was nursing the kiddo to write after the kiddo was born. Free time and a new kiddo. It was the best of times. I think that comes through in the writing.

          I sent the manuscript to everyone. I got wonderful rejection letters. It was really written for the turn of the millennium, but I had another look at it a couple of years ago when my agent failed to sell something else. So I updated it and re-wrote parts of it, and I loved doing that, getting my hands on it again. The agent told me he thought it was "wonderful". He tried to sell it at the Frankfort and London Book Fairs, but I think the satire on American politics put the big bucks off.

        There is a radio play embedded in this book. On the last re-write I added a few lines to the dialogue, but there is a radio play sitting in there somehow.

        When I was re-writing it, the character I based the physicality of Angus McSorley on died. I meant to put a dedication into the book, but in the storm of uploading this stuff I forgot. I'll contact his widow right now and see if she thinks that would be alright.
         
         I don't care if nobody buys it! It's a gem anyway.