The end of the drought

I guess the drought is over.  We're enjoying floods at the moment.  And there was an ad on TV the other night telling farmers to prepare for plagues of locusts!  Is this biblical or what?

Here's a rather fine photo which SB took on her way to work the other day.  Once there were paddocks!

Kathleen Maher reviews The Grease Monkey's Tale

Kathleen Maher, who blogs at Diary of a Heretic (with online fiction and flash fiction) has posted a tremendous review of The Grease Monkey's Tale at Goodreads and on her Reviews and Memes blog.  You can read Kathleen's work and the review by clicking the links.

Kathleen also writes for The View From Here, where much of her flash fiction has been published.

Exclusively Independent promotion

It's been a superb week for The Grease Monkey's Tale.  There's been a lot of interest in the book and it pleases me no-end to hear readers frequently describing it as a page-turner and a thriller.

Last Friday, I found out it had been included as one of six titles in the Exclusively Independent promotion.  That involves being distributed to a number of independent booksellers in the London area and promoted for six weeks.  Superb news indeed.

Have had a piece about the process of writing posted on the EI site here.

Friday Night at the Movies with Gary Davison

Yep, it's Friday Night at the Movies with me Geordie mate Gary Davison in the chair.  For the second time, Gary's making a guest appearance here, while I'm over at his site making a guest appearance there, and we're... well, perhaps I should just pass the keyboard over to Gary:

Drum roll, please. Brrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Not quite the same as the lion letting rip, but no matter. The challenge this week that Paul and I have come up with is to name our favourite movies from the last four decades. With a couple of wild cards.

1970s – I was jammed between a few here, trapped you could say, but some things did not remain trapped for long in my first selection:

Blazing Saddles – The sheriff of Rockridge and Mongo and beans has never left my mind and every time I watch this I’m doubled over.

1980s – It was my teenage years, which included a small amount of truancy, so it figures that my next choice would be up there:

Ferris Buellers Day Off. 1986, the year I left school. Cool, cool film.

1990s – by now alcohol was playing a part in my life and I was fond of the odd kebab, a combination which the star of my next pick held close to his heart. And like everyone else, I was covering my eyes when anyone dared to go near his prison cell:

Silence of the Lambs – naughty.

00s – It’s modern day (last year, I think) and this film, Bollywood I think they call it, was winning Oscars like no tomorrow. I thought, Nah, not for me, but there were too many five star ratings to ignore, so we went. What a movie. Gritty, sexy, thrilling, edge of your seat and amazingly directed:

Slumdog Millionaire.

My couple of wildcards need no introduction, except to say I will watch these two films, at the right time of the year, for the rest of my life:

Tombstone and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.

Cheers, Gary.  Now, put your jacket on, drop the latch and head off to the flicks for a night to remember. 

Check out Gary's novels Fat Tuesday and Streakers, and the novel writing competition opportunity A Tale of Two Halves, on Amazon.

Technology stuff

Before the inimitable Gary Davison and I mix things up again on our two blogs - we'll be rabbiting on about films this time - thought it was time to post the bit about technology that I wrote for Gary's site a few weeks back.

I'm sitting on the couch, looking at the trees in the back garden, laptop on my knee, dictating these words straight onto the screen using a headset and Dragon Naturally Speaking.  Both my PC and this here laptop have changed the way I write, and every now and then I try out a different approach in the way I use them, but it all adds up to the fact that they’ve made the writing process infinitely more enjoyable and innovative – given me greater scope to play with words.  Everything associated with this bundle of technology – the Internet, networking, blogging, researching – have opened opportunities for me as a writer that I otherwise wouldn't have had ... and cheers to that.  (Not completely sure about the voice recognition program yet; it's great for first drafts but can be a bit of a bastard at times and doesn't help the refining process.)
 

The second bundle of technology I’d be gutted to lose has to be my iPod Touch and the Sony Dream Machine I dock it with.  After watching Vanilla Sky a number of years back, I hankered after a more sophisticated alarm to wake me in the morning than the old digital thing that sounded like a truck reversing over my head – the exact scene it managed to ram into my dreams practically every day.  My Dream Machine wakes me with whatever music I'm in the mood for (and the iPod’s then ready to let me check emails and see what’s happening in blogdom before I crawl out of bed).  Although I usually leave the music on shuffle, it uncannily knows that I want mellow at 6:40 in the morning and I’ll drift awake to Nina Simone, Cat Power, Billie Holiday, Piers Faccini – something bluesy and soothing – although occasionally it’ll throw a wet flannel at me by thundering out Led Zeppelin or Daft Punk instead.  Now, if it could also make that first crucial cup of tea of the day it'd be even better.  I’m nothing without that first brew.
 

As for my third most-cherished piece of technology, you’ll probably think me a real hick, but after twenty years we finally traded in our old wood heater for a ritzy-titsy gas fire (glowing embers, realistic logs, the lot) the other week.  So good is it that a friend recently spent two hours sitting by it and then asked why we’d still got a wood heater.  It might sound like nothing to crow about, but it’s winter right now in this hemisphere and it’s been a cold one at that, and I was getting heartily sick of clambering up trees with a chainsaw, stacking several square metres of timber, of spending weekends slamming down a log splitter, to say nothing of getting a fire going after work each day, so it’s bliss to walk into the room, flick on a switch and be able to sit down next to it with a decent glass of shiraz five minutes later.  There’s technology for ya.

Radio Interview

Did a brief interview on  3WAY-FM Great Ocean Radio last Thursday morning with John MacInnes.  John was asking me about The Grease Monkey's Tale and the Port Fairy launch of the PaperBooks edition, which took place yesterday evening at Blarney Books & Art (photos coming soon).  It's always good to be able to plug a book and an event, and I thank John and 3WAY-FM for that.

Such news leaves me with the option to segue into Video Killed the Radio Star, almost any track from Radiohead or On the Radio from Regina Spektor. Although I'm a fan of both Radiohead and Regina Spektor, the lady won because I've always loved the poetry of the following lyrics.

This is how it works:

You're young until you're not,

You love until you don't,

You try until you can't,

You laugh until you cry,

You cry until you laugh,

And everyone must breathe

Until their dying breath.

Spot on!

Sylvia Plath

Don't often get to see a play, unfortunately, but caught a tremendous one at the weekend on the life of Sylvia Plath: The Girl Who Wanted To Be God, directed by Brenda Palmer.  A very sharp script (with even a touch of Gerard Manley Hopkins in there) and superbly acted, it presented three personas of Plath and how they were often in conflict with one another.  Sylvia Plath's husband (the late Poet Laureate Ted Hughes) didn't come across too well (unsupportive, egotistical, adulterous) and that may well have been a fair representation of how things were, but I remember thinking years ago - when Ted Hughes visited Kingston Poly, where I was studying Literature at the time - what a cheery scene breakfast must have been in the Plath/Hughes household.  There'd be Sylvia with more than a few problems of her own on one side of the table and a dour Ted on the other - just a crumpled box of Cornflakes between them.  Both stunning poets, but each, I imagine, engrossed in their own poetry.

Incidentally, hearing Ted Hughes recite his work marked the beginning of a conviction - which I haven't changed since - that poets should never read their own poems.  There he stood in his drab overcoat, just a few feet from the Student Union bar, with a pint of beer in one hand and a tatty piece of paper in the other, monotoning his poetry to death.  Mind, it was a cold night and the beer was bloody awful... and I'm still a fan of his writing.

By the by, The Girl Who Wanted To Be God was performed at Blarney Books & Art, which is hosting an event this Saturday to celebrate the UK launch of The Grease Monkey's Tale - bless 'em.

The Moyne Gazette profile

One of the local newspapers - The Moyne Gazette - interviewed me last week and ran a one-page profile on Thursday.  I've posted the piece over on the Reviews/Interviews page (see tabs above).  It's running ahead of a local launch for the PaperBooks edition of The Grease Monkey's Tale next weekend.

Was looking through the ImprovEverywhere site for that Grand Central piece a  couple of posts back and came across the No Pants Subway Ride clip.  Tremendous.  Apparently it happens every year: thousands of New Yorkers take off their daks at the same moment to ride the subway.  You've gotta love the looks of surprise on the faces of the other unsuspecting passengers.

ImprovEverywhere pull some wonderful stunts.  Take, for instance, the Star Wars Subway Car.  Here are both clips.  Check 'em out and then go do something silly.

Blood, sweat and tears ... but finished!

The front of my head is bruised from all the times I've hit it against the wall in frustration, but after a year of cursing (and more than a few tears), the new website is finally finished and up and running.

Yep, the makeover of http://paulburman.net/ is complete.  It's a Flash-based website, this one, and first time round it might take 30 seconds to load (depending on the speed of your connection), but hopefully it'll be worth your while... and it'll load in a flash after that.

Enjoy - I hope you do.

Also, have just posted a profile of the Australian literary agent (and author) Gaby Naher over on the Opportunities page of The View from Here.

Now to repair that hole in the wall.

Dancing on the beach

Am in the mood for a little dancing on the beach, so here you go...

And, in a similar vein - well, no, it's the opposite really - here's the Improv Everywhere scene I posted a couple of years back from Grand Central, which still amuses me.