I’ve just sent out a survey to the folks on the ‘Inanimate Alice’ mailing lists.  If you like surveys, and if you like ‘Inanimate Alice’, I’d love to hear from you! I am thinking about attempting to write a novel based on the Alice stories, for the young adult market (13+) and I’m attempting to collect some basic information about the audience for ‘Inanimate Alice’.  We have three fairly substantial mailing lists, so I’ve written to them all and asked everyone to complete the survey.

If you are interested, you can find the survey at Inanimate Alice Survey.

I promise not to sell you answers or use them in any way other than to get a small snapshot of our audience!

At DMU where I am Reader in Creative Writing and New Media (I still can’t get over my own grandness), my colleague Sue Thomas and I are in the middle of setting up a new research group, the Transliteracy Research Group, otherwise known as TRG.  Snappy, I know!  I already have a couple of PhD students at DMU, but we are both looking to encourage more PhD students to join us.  If you are interested in doing a PhD with us, drop me a line on kpullinger (at) dmu (dot) ac (dot) uk.

I’ve got new short stories in not one, but two brand new anthologies, published this month:  Punk Fiction and Paint A Vulgar Picture (both links will take you to Amazon) -  ‘Public Image Ltd’ in ‘Punk Fiction’, and ‘Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now’ in ‘Paint a Vulgar Picture’.

‘Punk Fiction’ is edited by one of my fabulous students on the MA, Janine Bullman, while ‘Paint a Vulgar Picture’ is edited by Peter Wild.

Both stories take and develop further a character I’ve been writing about for a while now - five short stories to date. All stories are told in the first person, narrated by Richard, who is turning out to be a slightly lonely, slightly crackers, middle-aged man, devoted father and husband (though there is an edge to the latter relationship), estranged from his father…  This is not something I’ve done before, found myself writing about the same character in a series of stories, but I’ve been enjoying it, and plan to write more.

Here’s a very short Richard story, first one I wrote in fact.

The Day the Mormons Came

I was at home with a sick child when the doorbell rang.  I opened the door and was faced with a small army of Mormons.

‘We have come to share our news with you and your boy.’  The tallest one spoke first.

‘You have?’  How did they know about the boy?

‘Yes, Richard, we have heard you calling us, late at night, we have heard your voice in the blessed ether.’

‘You have?’  How did they know my name?  And calling out, late at night, this was news to me.  Or was it?  Did I call out at night for a God I did not believe in?  The idea felt uncomfortably familiar.  I’m practically a professional atheist; I work as an orderly in the secure psychiatric wing of the hospital.  God abandoned those people a long time ago.  And now there is the sick child to add to my list of grievances.

‘You know,’ I said, ‘the boy’s not well.  We’re having a quiet day.  You’ll have to come back another time.’

‘We don’t have long here on earth,’ the shortest one said.

‘Things are happening.’

‘Well, nothing is happening in my house.  We are quite all right without you. Thanks but no thanks.’

I closed the door abruptly. As they turned away, a couple of them gave each other stiff masculine hugs, as though expressing the depth of their disappointment in me. I went back into the sitting room and lay down on the sofa. My boy came over and got on top of me. I put my arms around him and we turned our full attention to the TV.

‘The Mistress of Nothing’, which comes out in mid-July in the UK, October in Canada, is featured as one of 22 Editor’s Top Picks at The Book Depository.  It’s great to see it there, and I hope it stays there until the book is actually available to buy!!  Still, you can pre-order it, and there’s a countdown on the website - only 65 days to go!!!  Place your orders now!

The book is up on Amazon already too… so if you want to pre-order, please do!!

I don’t know that I’ve ever pre-ordered anything ever; my son pre-ordered the new Percy Jackson yesterday, but it comes out today, so that doesn’t really count.  The publicist from my UK publisher told me the other day that orders from bookshops are way down; according to her, the upside of this dire situation is that returns are way down as well - I guess if retailers don’t order the book in the first place, they don’t have to send it back when it doesn’t sell.  Returns:  bad.  Pre-orders:  good.

Oh the joys of book publishing.

I’ve written a new blog post for the folks at Internet Evolution > Thinker Net, which they’ve called ‘Coping with Book Censorship in the Digital Age’ Last time I wrote a post for these people, it attracted a lot of interesting comment and discussion, so hopefully this time it will as well, though there’s a comment up already from, ahem, M. Hulot, which isn’t all that… well… serious, it seems to me.  Anyway, have a read.  Feel free to comment here, or over there, although to comment on Internet Evolution you need to register and open an account with them.

I have done two year-long stints as writer-in-residence in Her Majesty’s Prisons here in the UK, in the early 90s in HMP Gartree, and at the end of the 90s in HMP Maidstone.  I found both residencies hugely rewarding and hugely exhausting. I don’t know if I’d work in a prison again - the frustrations are manifold and the entire penal system needs a complete rethink (she said blithely).  But I’m currently Chair of the board of trustees for ‘Not Shut Up’, a magazine that publishes creative writing produced by the residents of London’s prisons.  It’s a great mag, edited by screenwriter Hugh Stoddard; however, like many arts organisations on the margins, our existence is under threat due to cuts in funding.

I never met Erwin James during my residencies, but I admired his column in the Guardian, and felt he wrote about prison issues from the inside with great clarity.  I even wrote to him once, in response to a column, something I’ve never done before or since.  When the book of his columns, A Life Inside, was published, I was invited to the launch, where I had the exhilarating experience of running into one of the lifers I’d worked with in Gartree in his new post-prison life.

A friend in facebook brought this new article, ‘The Real Me’, by James to my attention today; it’s an extraordinary piece.

Chris and I have got the green light for our project to create 9 multimedia short stories for primary school kids with educational publisher, Rising Stars.  The project, Lifelines, will allow us to tell stories that are directly related to the Key Stage 2 curriculum, using text and image and sound.  They’ll have voiceover as well and so should be fully accessible for a big variety of readers.

This kind of publishing is a new departure for Rising Stars but with the rapid increase of use of Virtual Learning Environments and online educational content set to take place in classrooms over the next few years, they should be onto a good thing. There’s a short demo online at the link above.

Having been offline for the last couple of weeks, I’m slowly waking up to the online world again.  The Oxford Literary Festival future of the book discussion went well, once I got over the shock of seeing Philip Pullman in the audience.  Sunday Times columnist Bryan Appleyard told great stories of being plagiarised all over the world because his copy goes out on the internet; the irony is that he now knows when and where he’s being plagiarised because of the internet.

Meanwhile, in Canada, looks as though they’ll be electing a writer as Prime Minister next time there’s an election; the US have already elected a writer as President.  Maybe that’s the future of the book - we should all run for public office instead.

Here it is, a bound copy of the uncorrected proof.

Such an odd moment, this one, when you are given a bound copy of the proof - it’s such an almost-book object.  Full of mistakes - actually, these proofs don’t have many mistakes at all - but there it is, looking much like the final copy will look.  The cover will be tweaked, other minor changes will take place, but there it is.  Nearly ready.

The pre-publication period is strange and tough and discombobulating; it’s when one’s hopes for the book collide against reality.  Good things happen - in my case, people are beginning to read the book, and early responses have been great - but there is much to worry about regarding how the book will find its readers.  Will the bookshops take it in sufficient quantities?  Will it get enough reviews?  Will it get on any longlist or shortlist or book-of-the-year-list or any other list that might help it find readers?  Or will it appear only to disappear in a puff of not-enough-attention smoke?

In my case, this book will likely be the last book I write that exists solely as a print artefact, with no direct online iteration.

In the meantime, I’m off to Oxford today, to debate the future of the book. We are on at the same time as Mario Vargas Llosa.  Hmm.

[caption id=“attachment_130” align=“alignleft” width=“86” caption=“UK paperback edition”][/caption]

I’ve added a new Page to this blog, making signed copies of some of my books available to purchase directly from me with, if you so desire, a personalised dedication.  I’m sure I’ll have an absolute deluge of orders (not, but I live in hope).  When I say ‘I’, of course, as usual, what I mean is ‘with help from Chris J’ - getting that paypal button to work was beyond the limits of my patience.

There’s something about the phrase ‘personalised dedication’ that doesn’t feel right - is it just that it sounds cheesy?  It’s great fun getting your book signed - I mean that as a reader - and I always enjoy it when, as a writer, at signings people ask for specific messages to be written in the book, either for themselves or other people.  There’s something about defacing my own books that gives me pleasure.  Anyway, if you can think of a better form of words than ‘personalised dedication’, let me know!