The Snowing and Greening of Thomas Passmore

What's to be said?

It's out there. It's released.

Can't think of anything else to say.

Gob-smacked!

Six Unspectacular Facts

I’ve been tagged by Stella with a meme: to provide six unspectacular facts about myself. The rules of the meme also include linking back to he/she who tagged, mentioning the rules, tagging a further six bloggers by linking, and leaving a comment for each blogger.
Here goes:

1. Because I’m not very good at handling animals, my first pet was a tortoise (easy to catch and easy to pick up).


2. My first ambition in life was to be a stage coach robber (not sure who would’ve looked after my horse, given my poor animal-handling skills, but I couldn’t have made a quick getaway on a tortoise).


3. I’m better at swimming underwater than on the surface (I suck – literally).


4. Was a vegetarian for over twenty years, but started eating fish after almost colliding with an edible-sized whiting, which had a length of fishing line hooked to its mouth. Tried unsuccessfully to catch it, and was unsure whether I’d release it or eat if I did, but started craving fish from that point on. (Fortunately, I haven’t been tempted to jump into paddocks and wrestle with cows or sheep, or any other living thing... except the occasional carrot and potato.)


5. When people ask me what the R of my middle name stands for, I tell them Rumpelstiltskin (even though I can’t spin gold from straw).


6. When I stopped working for the Post Office, I had to sign the Official Secrets Act (which I’ve probably contravened by mentioning it), even though I never could remember the price of a first class stamp.


7. I believe it’s healthy to question accepted values and beliefs, and that some rules need to be broken. (Hence a seventh unspectacular fact and, in the absence of directly tagging six other bloggers, an invitation to join this meme if it interests you. If you choose to, let me know and I’ll post a comment.)

Countdown

It's been a busy and exciting week. The Portland Observer ran an interview on Monday 11th August (click here), the PaperBooks website has leapt into high gear (regular blogs, an Online Shop with special offers, heaps of useful links...) and The View From Here launched the second edition of its print magazine (click here to preview and/or order).

And The Snowing and Greening of Thomas Passmore is now less than two weeks away from appearing in UK bookstores!!! (If anything deserves three exclamation marks, for me this is it.) I'll be posting the occasional blog over at PaperBooks before and after the release, so if you get a chance it'd be great to see you there too sometime.

Welcome

Welcome to the new blog. I thought it was time for a more dynamic site, with the opportunity to include additional pages, and where I could maintain a series of links instead of having to bounce these back from the website. So here it is. A new roost.

And timely, given the massive changes that have taken place on the PaperBooks website.

Have been looking for a follow-on to the Thunderbirds opening sequence, and had fun at YouTube revisiting some old favourites (Fireball XL5, Stingray, The Saint and a heap more), but decided to stick with the bird image for the moment. Just in case anyone gets to feeling too cosy!

Welcome.

Thunderbirds Are Go!

Lucy, the dynamic publicist at PaperBooks and Legend Press, has been channelling some of her dynamism towards promoting The Snowing and Greening of Thomas Passmore in recent weeks. There's been an online interview at WriteWords (which I haven't seen because I'm not a member), a short piece in the UK's Northampton Chronicle & Echo (which my Mum and Dad discovered for me) and an interview in one of my local newspapers, The Standard (which the world and his dog seemed to read yesterday).

It's been a busy, fun week. This is something I could get addicted to.

I've also enjoyed interviewing Caroline Hamilton, author of Consumed, which is a particularly fine novel I reviewed on this blog a couple of months back. You can read this by clicking The View From Here.

What's more, it's only four weeks until ...

Saturday, 30th August!

You can please some of the people some of the time, but...

Was beginning to think there was something wrong with me.

Almost every book I’ve picked up in the last few weeks has got dumped before I reached the end. And this despite each one coming with some heavy-duty recommendations.

What works for one doesn’t necessarily work for somebody else. It’s a matter of taste and the preference of the moment, and is all very subjective, which isn’t a bad thing. It’d be a boring world if we all enjoyed the same things, and for the same reasons.

All the same, the process forces me to question what I’m looking for in a piece of writing, and how I might address this myself. And how to sustain a reader’s interest when they might be feeling a little flighty and not easily hooked.

First off the rank was John Banville’s The Sea (winner of the 2005 Man Booker Prize) which I stopped reading at page 40. This was followed by Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris, which won a Richard and Judy British Book Award for 2008, and which my sister and my wife both enjoyed tremendously (whereas I came to an end with it by page 51). Then I tried James Frey’s ‘memoir’ A Million Little Pieces, which grabbed me so soundly for 160 pages that I carried on reading for 130 pages more despite feeling that nothing new was happening, and eventually stopped reading with 210 pages to go. After this catalogue of failure on my part as a reader, I was determined to finish Penelope Green’s autobiography When In Rome ... and did. T'ra-t'ra!

Somehow I had to break the jinx.

I won’t go into why I put three of these books down prematurely, although I try not to reject a book until I know why I’m doing it. The important thing to remember is that each of these books worked well for big numbers of other people. Who knows, but perhaps the planets were out of alignment or something as far as I was concerned. Perhaps I chose the wrong book for the wrong moment. Selecting a book to read can be a random process at times.

Things are happening

Work on Number Two got seriously delayed in the second half of the holidays recently, but all in a good cause. The final layout for The Snowing and Greening of Thomas Passmore arrived, prior to being sent to the printers, and I was bouncing about the place with a mixture of nerves and excitement as I worked my way through it, checking that everything was as it should be. It’s interesting to see ‘house style’ applied to punctuation and formatting (double inverted commas versus singles, for example) and to see what the words look like on the actual page. The process also made me realise how easy it is for a typo or two to slip into 84,000 words, even when you’ve drafted and redrafted dozens of times---probably because of that redrafting---but I hope and trust that every little i is dotted and every little t is crossed now. Having said that, I recently came across a typo in a recent edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four, which goes to show that these little blighters can even slip into the pages of modern classics.

Also heard that Borders (UK) have offered to include The Snowing and Greening in their Independents promotional bay for six weeks, from September through to mid-October, which will be a tremendous kick-start, following its release on 30th August. Great stuff!

And still on the good news front, The View From Here has been launched as a print magazine in the United States. Mike French, editor of The View From Here, has put together an attractive and exciting literary magazine using articles and interviews from the online version, and has generously given The Snowing and Greening of Thomas Passmore a significant promotion. Today the States, tomorrow the world! To preview the print magazine, follow the link in Mike’s announcement.

Sparks

Been out of town and down to the city for a few days. A matter of making the most of the last precious days of holiday before heading back to work.

It's always good to spoil ourselves in Melbourne, to meander through a few galleries, catch up with a few exhibitions and sample a few new restaurants. It's good to do this even in the middle of winter ... particularly in the middle of winter.

Art Deco 1910--1939 was at the top of our list of exhibitions this time, although we took in Photographers in the circle of Alfred Stieglitz and a few others besides. And we seemed to lean towards Italian and Greek cuisine on the whole, although this was by chance more than design.

Whilst it made a break from sitting at a keyboard and constructing fiction, the interesting thing is that these expeditions always spark a frenzy of ideas and I always want a few days afterwards just to ride on the energy they provide. There doesn't have to be any connection whatsoever between what I'm looking at and what I'm working on, but the interesting thing is that being surrounded by other people's ideas and interpretations of the world sharpens my focus and sense of what can be achieved. It leaves my head bouncing with new directions and fresh layers of ideas, and needing to write, write, write, before I explode, or forget.

Here's a flavour of the Art Deco era to get you tapping your feet and courting and sparking.

Flat chat

Am engrossed in a major rewrite of Number Two at the moment, or what I hope will become Number Two ... if the ideas hold their sense, if the characters continue speaking to me, if the words fall into place. It's all a matter of If. Things are working well at the moment, so I'm making the most of it. And it's good timing because I've just started a fortnight's holiday, and it's winter and raining and cold outside, and I've got the wood fire stoked up inside. I think I've rediscovered the story's momentum and the new places I'd like to go with it, and I'd like to get this latest draft finished by October. That's the plan.

Recent reads

Although I’m a fan of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, I’ve read and discussed it so many times now (it having been on the curriculum for three years) that I was getting close to throwing it out onto the lawn and thrusting a garden fork of my own through it. That’s nothing against the quality of the writing---I still admire it---but I feel pretty much the same way after dissecting any text for a third or fourth time in a row. Defenestration, followed by impalement.

It was partly this that made me hesitate to pick up A Spot of Bother for several months, which is how long Mark Haddon’s second novel has been sitting on my stack of books. This and the fact that I’d heard a few people declare that A Spot of Bother didn’t live up to Curious Incident. And the fact that, at 503 pages, it was about 300 pages longer than I like a novel to be. All the same, the time felt right recently to pick it up and make a start; but, having started it, it soon became one of those books I didn’t want to put down again. Loved it.

A Spot of Bother doesn’t live up to Curious Incident because it doesn’t need to. Its success lies, in part, in the fact that it’s very different, and is, if anything, more entertaining. Comprising 144 very short chapters, Haddon rotates the point of view in every chapter, exploring the unique perspective of each key character in turn, as events unravel---and unravel they do. They may be soundly dysfunctional, these people whose lives we spy upon, but there’s also something archetypal about them, and I feel sure I’ve met each one in real life. Whilst A Spot of Bother might have a lighter and more frivolous touch to it than Curious Incident, that’s exactly what’s needed here. It’s a wonderfully crafted and satisfying novel, with plenty of wry humour and is certainly a compelling read.