I’m trying to get my head around a new project I’ll be working on, ‘Surveillance Suite’.  I first worked with James Coupe in 2004 on a piece called ‘Call Centre’ (if you go to the link, make sure to listen to the sample call) for the Lancaster Literature Festival and the Storey Institute. Since then James has left the UK and gone to live in Seattle where he works at the University of Washington.  ‘Surveillance Suite’ is a massive new project with three phrases, building on James’s interest in CCTV footage, video, and story-telling.  We are just beginning work on Phase One of ‘Surveillance Suite’ which will be created during James’s artist’s residency at Lanternhouse in Ulverston, in the Lake District; here’s how James describes the piece on his website:

Over the course of the residency, he will produce a series of algorithmically generated films, shot on location around Ulverston. The films will be based upon Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, a self-referential novel consisting of ten chapters from ten different novels, all of varying style, genre and subject matter. All overlap slightly, suggesting a single meta-narrative, and all are interrupted at strategic points. What is absent or missing becomes a sub-plot all of its own: narrative is composed as much by what is not there as by what is.

Recorded footage will be run through a face recognition algorithm that identifies people’s age, gender, race, facial expression and movement patterns. Using a series of script rules derived from the novel and produced in collaboration with a number of scriptwriters, the everyday activities of the town will be transformed into narrative films. The auto-generated results will be compiled as video montages and exhibited in the Lanternhouse gallery.

Signing contracts today for the project ‘Lifelines’ that Chris and I are doing for educational publisher Rising Stars.  Between now and the end of the year we are going to create nine multimedia short stories aimed at KS3 - Key Stage 3, which in plain English means the first few years of secondary school. These stories will be similar to ‘Inanimate Alice’ in that they will use images, text, music, sound, etc, but, unlike Alice, they will be directed at specific aspects of the KS3 curriculum.  They will be published on CD as part of a package that will include teacher’s notes, lesson plans, etc. There’s a demo up on the ‘Lifelines’ site, but this might be all that will be available free online.

Part of what we’ve been trying to do with ‘Inanimate Alice’ is to find a way to make money from digital fiction projects.  ‘Lifelines’ is the first fairly large commercial commission that Chris and I have taken on; though its ethos is entirely different from Alice, for us it is a big step toward finding ways to create income from this type of work.

I’ve started doing interviews for ‘The Mistress of Nothing’; I’ve been having an e-mail exchange with blogger Sarah Hymas from ‘Echo Soundings’, a wonderful blog about poetry and sailing, and tomorrow am doing an in-the-flesh interview with BookArmy.  As well as this, DMU has decided that I’m an expert on Digital Britain and are hauling me around in order to do radio interviews on the subject.

Conversation yesterday with my agent, Rachel Calder, where, as is inevitable these days, we got onto the subject of how the book trade is in the process of eating itself. Rachel told me about how W H Smith, which now has an monopoly on all bookshops in UK airports, has done a deal with Penguin UK, and will now sell only Penguin travel titles in their shops in airports and train stations (where they also have a virtual monopoly).  It’s an extraordinary deal for Penguin, though only achieved after agreeing to give W H Smith a 70%+ discount on all their books.

Why doesn’t Smith’s care about giving their customers a range of titles?  Why does Penguin think it is a good idea to exchange exclusivity for a huge whack of their profits - doubtless this deep discounting will find its way back to what Penguin writers are paid for their work. How are all the travel writers who write for other publishers supposed to make a living?

Here’s an interesting update from the Bookseller on steps being taken by the Society of Authors and the Outdoor Writers and Photographers Guild (hey - I want to be an Outdoor Writer - if only it didn’t rain all the time) to make writers’ protests to this deal heard.  I was led to this article via a @Bookseller tweet.

News in just now that copies of my book will be delayed while they make sure the cover is perfect, and so the publication date will be delayed from 9 July to 16 July.  In the greater scheme of things this doesn’t make a lot of difference - just means I’ll have to wait a bit longer to get my grubby hands on the thing, as will everyone who has pre-ordered it already from Amazon, even if that is only my friend Mandy - yay Mandy!

The fact is that I’m still waiting for all those things in that list from my previous post on this subject.  Plus some other stuff too.  I get drip-fed rumours from my agent that foreign publishers are sniffing around my novel, considering whether or not to buy it for their own lists… I find it hard not to stop breathing.

But I do need to crack on with three big new projects, despite the absence of contracts… ‘Lifelines’ for Rising Stars, ‘Dorian Gray’, and a brand new collaboration with digital artist James Coupe - more on that in another post, another day.

I’ve gone ahead and got very nice postcards made of the cover of ‘The Mistress of Nothing’.  Post a comment here if you want me to send you one!

I’m hoping to begin work shortly on a new project, writing a libretto for an opera based on ‘Dorian Gray’.  It’s hard to think of anything much more exciting!  I’ll be working with Slovakian composer Lubica Cekovska on this commission for the Slovak National Opera in Bratislava.  Hooray.  Will be visiting Bratislava shortly to meet Lubica and her colleagues at the opera.

Re-reading ‘Dorian Gray’ has been interesting; the story is so firmly embedded in our literary culture.  I’d forgotten how grim it is, and how at odds with the story Wilde’s aphoristic style can feel at times. I’d also almost forgotten that the thing about the painting is not that it gets older while Dorian does not, but that it is a visual record of all Dorian’s sins - the painting grows vile as it manifests the evil in Dorian’s soul. When Dorian finally dies, he’s actually not that old - the novel mentions that it is 18 years since the painting was finished, so he can’t be much more than 38 or 40 or so.  Also, what the novel leaves out fascinates me - the stuff that Dorian gets up to down in London’s old docklands. Nasty.

So, this is a fantastic new departure for me, and one that I’m very excited about.  Plus it will give me an excuse to go to the opera more and more and more often.  Next up:  Berg’s ‘Lulu’ at Covent Garden.

‘The Mistress of Nothing’ has won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, 2009!! These past weeks have been a whirlwind of press and award activity, with an avalanche of Canadian media interest; I’m still in the middle of it all so will not have time to post things to this page for another week or so.

In the meantime,go to www.katepullinger.com/books to order a copy!

While in Ottawa the last week of November, 09, I did an interview, about winning the prize nd writing the book, with Nigel Beale for his website and radio broadcast.

I’ll be blogging about publication throughout the year; to read my posts about ‘The Mistress of Nothing’ click on ‘The Mistress of Nothing’ under Categories in the right-hand sidebar.  This will bring together all the posts about the book, the virtual book tour, as well as any materials for reader’s groups.

Please let me know what you think of the book by e-mailing me at katepullinger (at) yahoo (dot) co (dot) uk, or posting a comment here on my blog.

Follow me on Twitter @katepullinger

You can go directly to my virtual book tour interviews from these links:

Echo Soundings, Sarah Hymas - interview

Book Army - interview

Inside Books - interview (for review see below)

Writing Neuroses - review and interview combined

Adventures in Words - interview (for review see below)

Keeper of the Snails - review and interview combined

Tales from the Reading Room - review and interview combined

Essential Writers - interview (for review see below)

There’s a Q&A with me on the subject of the virtual book tour in the Observer newspaper.

Here’s a podcast of an interview I did with Sheila MacKay on CBC Radio’s North by Northwest, broadcast Sunday 18 October, 200: bcnxnw_20091018_21701

I wrote a piece for the Independent’s ‘Book of a Lifetime’, 24 July, 2009

I recorded a short reading for Echo Soundings/ Sarah Hymas; she has put it up on YouTube with a slideshow of images from Egypt:

To date, reviews of the book have appeared in

‘Good Housekeeping’ (‘scorchingly powerful’) and

‘Sainsbury’s Magazine’ and ‘The Times’

‘Red’, ‘The Gloss Magazine’, ‘New Books’, and ‘Saga’;

‘Metro’ newspaper (‘sumptious’)

online at Rob Chilvers Adventures With Words.

Other reviews are at

Culture (Sunday Times Supplement), Aug 9 2009

Daily Mail, July 31 2009

Guardian (Saturday Review), Aug 1 2009

Independent New Review (Supp. To Independent on Sunday), Aug 2 2009

Independent Book of the Day, 20 August, 2009

Inside Books, 25 August, 2009

As well as these, Antony Beevor wrote a piece for the Guardian newspaper expressing his distaste for novels like mine, which he calls ‘faction’.  I’m hoping to be able to publish a reply in the Guardian.

Essential Writers, 13 October, 2009

The Bookbag, 30 July 2009

Canadian reviews are also appearing:

The Globe & Mail, 14 September 2009

As the publication of ‘The Mistress of Nothing’ creeps nearer here in the UK, I’m organising a virtual book tour with my publicist at Serpent’s Tail in the UK, the lovely Rebecca Gray, and at McArthur & Co in Canada, the bewitching Devon Pool.

My image manipulation skills are so poor - but this is the final version of the cover - the woman has sleeves!  Yes!

I stole the idea of a virtual book tour from Elizabeth Baines, so thanks to Elizabeth for that!

To date we have five bloggers who have expressed an interest in reading the novel and interviewing me for their blog.  They are as follows:

One of the things I find hardest about being a writer is all the waiting you have to do.  At any given moment I will be waiting for someone to make a decision that will inevitably have a big effect on my working life.  Here’s a list of what I’m waiting for currently:

1.  book proposal in with a publisher - this is a biggie, because if they don’t like it I’ll have my work cut out with re-working it, and if they do like it, then I’ll have to write the book.  Yikes.

2.  contracts being drawn up and negotiated with educational publisher for project to create 9 digital short fictions for the classroom. This will happen, but before it does, I have to wait before getting started on the project… with the hoped-for delivery date drawing nearer all the time.

3.  book publication - ‘The Mistress of Nothing’ is coming out on 6 July and this means a lot of twiddling of thumbs and holding of breath while waiting to find out if any of our efforts to publicise the book (get it reviewed, get interviewed, getting invited to do readings and festivals etc etc etc) bear fruit.  Double Yikes.

4.  1 conference proposal and 1 submission to digital anthology - will my work be selected?  Could make a huge difference to everything.

5.  all the other stuff I’m too paranoid to write about here - various decisions regarding My Future.  Triple Yikes!

Currently, the amount of waiting I’m doing is outweighing the amount of actual work I’m doing - I’ve reached a tipping point of sorts, I guess, where the pressure of waiting is greater than the pressure of writing and, as a result, I can’t do much of anything apart from try to understand the purpose of Twitter, hang around in Facebook, reply to old e-mails, and write blog posts.  Luckily, I have to go out for a meeting shortly.

Ordinarily I am not grateful for meetings.

Next month, my work on ‘Flight Paths’ and other projects will be featured in ‘Line of Influence’, an online exhibition curated by Jeremy Hight and S.C. Nakatani on their site, ‘Binary Katwalk’. The current featured artist is Vuk Cosic; his version of the opportunity afforded by the exhibition is an elegant take on his influences down the years.  My iteration of the exhibition won’t be so comprehensive - I’ve written a bit about my digital evolution, and am featuring work by Caitlin Fisher, Renee Turner, and Christine Wilks.

The launch of ‘Line of Influence’ will coincide with the re-launch of ‘Flight Paths’.