Tuesday 5 July 2011

The Buddha and the Big Bad Wolf is on Kindle!



          I'm so pleased that this book has at last been published somewhere! It's partly about a journey I made with a friend in India and Nepal some time ago. I'd just had Are You Boys Cyclists? published by Serpent's Tail and this is how I spent most of the advance. After having a book published mainly because of its sexual content, I thought I like to write something that might actually do some good.

          That year I had an amazing mystical experience, and I wanted to write about that, about meditation, and about buddhism. And I wanted to develop the first person narrative style I'd used in Are You Boys Cyclists? What better than to write about going on a buddhist pilgrimage to Nepal, where the buddha was born, and India, where he attained enlightenment? But it didn't turn out like that!

          When I finished the book, I sent it to every agent in the Writer's and Artist's Yearbook. No dice. Then I started sending it around the publishers until I reached the ones whose name began with E. Element Books. They said they wanted to publish it and asked for the usual bit of re-writing. Hurrah! But I was in the middle of writing In the Land of the Demon Masters and told Element I'd start doing the re-writes during my next summer holidays. After some correspondence with an editor at Element, I did the re-writes and after a wee while got a letter from them. I was a bit nervous when I got the letter, but strangely enough I wasn't too bothered when I opened it. It started: Dear John, I sorry to tell you .... there was a big stamp across it saying FINANCIAL ADMINISTRATOR. The publisher had gone belly up!!

          Then I thought I had made a deal with a publisher in Glasgow last year after a friend of mine read it and liked it so much he wanted to sent it to them. I'm really not sure what happened there, but publishing is in such a ferment right now with the advent of ebooks .... anyway, it was very encouraging that someone else liked the book and it was a great night in the pub!

          The Buddha And The Big Bad Wolf is a great title. People have told me it's funny. Yours on Kindle for only £1:71!

3 comments:

  1. Just read it this weekend. Hard to describe what I got from this, but maybe a underside view of enlightenment and the effort needed to set it up.

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  2. Steve! Glad you managed to get through it. It's not your normal travel book, or religious book for that mattter, is it?

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  3. The follow up book is TheBlissBook which is a bit easier on the mind!!

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