Authors Electric

Thsi is an expansion of something I posted on my personal blog this month. I wanted to post itagain in part because not many people saw it there, and in part because it's the best news I've had in a long long time! It's funny how things come at you out of the blue. This month, a surprise but wonderfully welcome announcement has turned my writing plans upside down. A while ago I entered a "first lines" competition on the Harper Collins website Authonomy for a bit of a laugh. I entered the first line from The Man Who Painted Agnieszka's Shoes, a line I've always loved:  "It's nearly midnight and I've watched Agnieszka die 103 times since I woke."  Mine was one of 1208 entries. Anyway, this Tuesday I discovered, when someone posted this link on my Facebook wall , that I'd won. (this image, by the wonderful photographer and my long-time collaborator Veronika von Volkova , perfectly captures the atmosphere of The Man Who Painted ...

So I was talking to some of the lovely people here about bookstores, and saying how I was lucky to have a great relationship with not one but two of my local stores, The Albion Beatnik and *the* Blackwell’s , both in Oxford. And I was saying how both relationships had been forged not despite what I do online with ebooks and all kinds of things digital, but because of it. They said that’d be a really good thing to blog about, the way embracing digital can work for the author and the store. (l-r me, slam poet Lucy Ayrton, Sophia Satchell-Baeza of Dissocia , and Oxford International Women's Festival and Oxford Pride poetry MC Anna Hobson pose outside The Albion Beatnik for the poster for This is Oxford , wherein we take over Blackwell's for the night on October 18th) And I thought yeah, fantastic, and I can talk about some great shows I’ve got coming up at those stores at the same time. Only. How could I possibly talk anything else when we’re two days away from one of the...