Lights! Camera! Trumpets!

It’s still in rough at this point, but for those of you who are interested, behold: The Key to Starveldt!

(Apologies for the tiny graphic – the other images I have are all Adobe PDFs, and I can’t figure out how to make them into JPEGs for ease of use.)

As I type this, the edited pages for TKTS are sitting just to my left, and I am anticipating that a fully updated manuscript will be sent back to Ford Street  – who now have a shiny new website – by the end of this weekend. I can’t give you a concrete release date yet, but right now, it’s looking to be sometime in August/September 2011. Apart from all the work involved in sending final edits back and forth, printing the actual books and organising promotions, the fact that I now live in Scotland means that physically getting myself to the launch has become a much more involved process than it was for Solace & Grief. However, while it would be nice to be on hand when the book hits shelves, I understand that certain of you are keen to see what’s been happening to Solace, Sharpsoft and the rest, so regardless of what happens with my travel plans, I’ll do my best to ensure the book comes out as soon as it reasonably can.

Solace & Grief: The Cover!

*blaring of trumpets*

Winter Conference Highlights

Yesterday was the Pan Macmillan Winter Sales Conference – my first ever book event, which I attended as part of the Ford Street delegation. It was a long day in the Yarra Valley full of free food, speed dating with sales reps, speeches and free wine, although not necessarily in that order, and I had an absolute blast. So here, recorded for posterity, are some of the highlights:

1. Spending the day with the wonderful George Ivanoff and Meredith Costain.

2. The proliferation of tiny little custard tarts topped with glazed strawberries, of which I devoured my own bodyweight.

3. The self-help author whose pitch to a room full of publishers included the words ‘nobody reads books anymore’ and the admission that he didn’t read, either.

4. The number of sales reps/Pan Macmillian people who were not only lovely and interesting, but fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

5. The speed-dating session, wherein I repeated myself umpteen times in the pursuit of marketing my book, but nonetheless had a fabulous time. And also, it was actually timed speed-dating. With table numbers and a stopwatch.

6. The free drinks from 5:30 onwards.

7. Bradley Trevor Grieve’s speech at dinner, which included a toast in Swahili and a rousing defence of dogs, and which made reference, among other things, to Hitler, skydiving, French cinema, fevered morphine dreams, Egyptian mythology, Paris Hilton and hermaphroditism.  

8. The part where I was awarded a soft toy Siamese cat for asking a vociferous and pedantic question about undines. 

9. The fact that, due to the effects of free alcohol and the suggestions of not one, but two lovely PanMac people and also my own madness, said toy cat was promptly dubbed Selina James Grieve. Thanks, Anita and Robin!

10. And this was only my first conference.

Linkalicious

Like most people, I occasionally Google myself. (Shut up.) Perhaps unlike most people, I habitually learn something I didn’t actually know, but probably should’ve done. Hence the following, quasi-belated links:

Running Deep, a short story;

The Nihilist Ice-Cream Parlour, another short story; and

An interview with Paul Collins, my publisher, in which (among other things) my book is mentioned.

Squee!