Zip It - free ebooks for all...

Inspired by the example of the mighty Wiley and in particular his assertion that "I've got all this music sitting on hard drives, and in the end it started to make me feel sick," I've decided to give away everything I've written since my last published book, "The Heritage".

You can download the whole lot in both .epub and pdf formats in a zip file from this link.

Actually, I'm exaggerating slightly, I haven't been able to collate all the short stories and other bits and pieces, so what you get is three novels...

Monsterboy - very strange, still and almost unreadable. Not for the faint of heart.
work - you'll probably enjoy the first two thirds or three quarters and then decide it's all gone Horribly Wrong.
After The Non-Event - no idea what you'll make of this as very few people have read it.

That's the order they were written in, if chronological integrity is of any importance to you...

If you like anything feel free to pass on to friends, colleagues, randoms.

You see...

...as soon as I say I've shut it down I start posting again. I'm contrary like that.

Anyway, the reason is as follows. I'm one of the smugerati who have an iPhone and last week I got hold of iBooks, Apple's new app (see what they did there?) for reading ebooks. It's excellent, taking the best elements of the doughty Stanza, the look of another app called Classics and fitting it all seamlessly on your computer within iTunes. The big advantage of this is that we're all familiar with iTunes. Figuring out how to find or download or load an ePub file into Stanza was always a long thing, but with iBooks all you have to do is drag and drop into iTunes and it appears in a nice little folder labelled Books.

Anyway, to celebrate this momentous change in reading habits I'm giving away an ePub file of a short story I wrote a year or so ago called "Taking The Biscuit". I don't think it's been published before, although I read it rather badly at the Book Club Boutique and was met with a combination of indifference, disgust and mild nothingness. Ah well. Anyway, I transformed it into an ePUb file sometime last year and this morning I added a natty 'cover'.

There's nothing more to say. Don't just stand there, download now.

As you may have noticed...

...I've killed this blog. Or rather, starved it to death. Or let it go feral. Anyway, what I mean is I'm not posting on it...

In the unlikely circumstances that you've come here because you want to know something about my writing, you can either read this 2008 article from The Independent (there hasn't been a huge amount to report since) or try some of my work for free using the Power of the World Wide Web and your best clicking finger:

"The Heritage" - a direct download link for the pdf of my second novel for Faber & Faber. No, I'm sorry, I don't have it in ePub or similar formats but I am giving it you for nothing, so stop complaining.
"The Worms" - short story on Dogmatika. Don't remember much about this one. I think I was pleased with it at the time.
"Tale" - short story on 3:AM. Tales of The Unexpected eat your heart out.
"Cops" - short story on Scarecrow. No one gets this one. Maybe there's nothing to get..?
"Doorsteps" - a short story for the March 2009 issue of Beat The Dust. Quite odd, if I remember rightly. Possibly lacking in any sense.
"Camera" - a very short story on the 3:AM site. A popular choice, sir...
"Hole" - a short story I wrote for Radio 3's The Verb now downloadable as a neat, tidy and free pdf. No, no ePub on this either, but maybe someday soon...
"Once Upon One" - a flash fiction on my main page. Rejected for some lame flash fiction comp, this poor orphan needs your love.
"Clear Water" extract - downloadable from the Faber & faber website (this link may be dead by now. I would imagine so, anyway).

If you wanted anything else, I'm afraid I can't help you at the moment. Unless it was to give me money or praise me or offer me a book contract, in which case email me: willATvernalandDOTcom

Shoddy Diagrams Stolen From The Internet

Don't blame me, blame Google... (one day they are going to eat you).

Lee Harwood, Marginal Gloss & Synchronous Mottramisation

Here's a good enough excuse that I can justify my theft (re-blogging?) from my dear, anonymous, unknown online source of refined literary youngsterism, Marginal Gloss. Outside my bathroom is a big pile of books which were on some shelves which had to go somewhere else. Near the top is an old collection of Lee Harwood's poetry, "Monster Masks," that I bought many years ago. The other day I sat on the floor reading it while I waited for my son to finish on the loo and go to bed. It includes the excellent "The Beginning Of The Story," which Marginal Gloss has now discovered a pdf of online (you have to scroll down through the other piece. Or read it and discover that you have it in a book you've found piled up outside your toilet...). I interviewed Lee Harwood around sixteen years ago when I lived in Brighton. He had me round for tea and was absolutely lovely. I was trying to be a poet but luckily I was far too bashful and awed to ask him to look at anything I'd written, despite (because of?) the debt it owed him. I was very pleased to find out, years later, that the article ended up on file in King's College as part their Eric Mottram archive. Mind you, he had a lot of magazines. I hate to think what the hall outside his bathroom looked like...

Superb Diagrams Stolen From The Internet

Part 1 of a series of diagrams stolen from across the World Wide Web... In this case, their theme is the superbity. Stay tuned...

News, You Lose

Just in case you care, I wanted you to know that my Twitter story, Trundlespike, is once again All Systems Go. I'm up to 80 tweets on that bad boy, so don't miss them. I like, in particular, that none of them make any real sense in isolation, so they are kind of anti-tweets. Anyhow...

In other 'news,' I'm writing again, properly, with some real sense of forward momentum and purpose. I have been working on a book in some form or other constantly since summer 2001 when I started "Clear Water". Then this February I finished a draft of something and just... stopped. I fiddled around with an idea, did a couple of months of research, began writing and then realised my heart wasn't really in it. Truth be told, I felt like I was doing it more because I felt it was the sort of book people would feel I should be writing than because I wanted to write it. Since then I've been dabbling with an idea which I've been thinking about and developing for years, an idea which, I've often felt, may well signal literary career suicide. But I guess I don't have much of a career in any case, and it's only in the last week or so that I've developed enough momentum to feel like I'm doing something worthwhile (from my point of view). It's such a great feeling and one I've missed. It will all vanish again, shortly, of course, and I'll be left with upward of a year's worth of plodding towards the end, but I'm enjoying it while it lasts. Updates to follow...

In the meantime, revel in my Boredom playlist on the Evil Empire of Spotify. It does exactly what it says on the box.

Thatcher Dead...

Funny yet disappointing all at once...

Free Ebooks - Tony White Bridled

James Bridle of booktwo.org has launched his new venture, Artists' eBooks, with three short stories from Tony White, all available for download to read online, on your mobile or iPhone, or an an e-Reader (though not the Kindle, haha). They're in the ePub format which it is generally hoped will become the industry standard, as, unlike the aforementioned Kindle's AZW, it's an open, non-DRM format.

All three stories "grew out of a residency at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London, and are part of an ongoing series called Balkanising Bloomsbury. Each story was written using a process which included cutting-up, remixing and renarrativising fragments from a number of sources including travel writing, Hague tribunal transcripts and mass media texts, to create completely new works of fiction which explore ideas of European identity." Mr White's work is always superb and Mr Bridle is a whizz-bang techno animal, so I'm off to download them now.

Apologies, Excuses, then Greene, Lin, Conrad, Bolaño, Vila-Matas, Marias & Barker (N)

I am thoroughly ashamed of myself. Not only have I failed to stick to my seven-posts-a-week rule with my twitter story, Trundlespike, I haven't posted anything on here for ages either. I looked at Marginal Gloss last night and thought of ripping off some of his posts, but I tried to load some flash game called Small Worlds he had said was "one of the most unlikely, thought-provoking online experiences I’ve had in some time" and it crashed my browser, which can only be taken as A SIGN (and not even a very unlikely one).

This morning I rowed half-heartedly with my little-but-good-peoples publisher and then we all made up again and agreed to Battle Onward. I did an interview about the record label with the esteemed Stevie Chick for a book about Ninja Tune. I read some Graham Greene.

I haven't read Graham Greene for absolutely years - over 20 I would think. But I went to a gig a few weeks back (the most-excellent Juice Aleem, who reminded me why hip hop will never completely die) and on my way to the tube I walked past two dodgy geezers laying out secondhand books next to the Cafe Nero on Tottenham Court Road. In the dark... I bought "The Honorary Consul" for £2 because it looked at a distance like it might be a first edition (WRONG! It was a Book Club edition) and because I thought I'd read somewhere that it was his darkest and best work (WRONG! That one had something to do with World War II and this one is set in Argentina in the '70s). But mainly because you don't often come across mobile booksellers at 11.30 at night on Tottenham Court ROad so I felt I should. Anyway, I haven't got to the Catholic Bit yet, so I'm quite enjoying it.

Before that, I read "Shoplifting From American Apparel" by Tao Lin. Hmmm. Dunno what to say really. I really loved "Eeee Eeee Eeee" but in his attempt to stop himself inserting the stuff which he says he deliberately inserted to "ruin" that book (in particular, the animals) he's made something which is maybe more true to his aesthetic but less sympathetic with my head. It works. It does work. He's still a million times better than all the Tao Lin imitators (and he must be doing something right to have spawned these bastards, who remind me of the lesser lights on anticon). But it doesn't catch me in the same way as it did with the bears. I really liked the bears.

Before that I read "Lord Jim," by Joseph Conrad which was strange and marvellous, oscillating between the sheer magnificence of the first section, the slightly odd colonial fantasy of the second section and then the fiendish denouement of the third, which makes sense of the second and casts the first in a completely different light.

Further back before that I knocked off "Skating Rink," the latest Eng-lang mini-masterpiece from the Bolaño estate. Familiar characters (minor South American poets ending up as exiles/immigrants in Spain and, in particular, working on a campsite) but here roped into the clutches of a murder mystery of some sort, in which the murder is the least important aspect.

Now we're working back into the mists of time and "Montano" by Enrique Vila-Matas, his follow-up to "Bartleby & Co". While I loved that book, Vila-Matas got a little too European on my ass this time around. I still read it all and bits were really funny but I'm not sure I wanted a book on literature sickness and the death of literature etc etc. I haven't got a degree in English Lit so I don't see why I should be subjected to this stuff now. Nevertheless, it has something - just maybe something a little too intellectual for me. I could kind of see why it had never made it into paperback, though.

Ooh, it's getting dark, or grey, or just hazy. I read the first part of "Your Face Tomorrow" trilogy by Javier Marias (I believe the last part is about to come out). I quite liked it but the sentences were all too long, which made it far more exhausting than it needed to be. That and the fact it was about memory (whilst purporting to be about predicting people's future actions) account for the reference to Proust on the back. But blimey, how many sub-clauses can I hold in my head at once..? Less than Javier, obviously. I like a nice full stop, me.

And I reach full stop with "Darkmans" by Nicola Barker, read some time last century (or maybe at the end of the summer?) which I absolutely loved. A big book made to seem short. She's a very unassuming writer - full of ideas and theories but wearing them lightly, slightly in love with all of her characters, amiable but tough, too. Much darker and odder than the summaries of it suggest. It's a really good book and shows, for that year at least, that not all Booker shortlists are full of unadulterated bollocks. Huzzah!

Twitter Chain - or, How To Kill Yourself Slowly Through Insignificance, You Wasteman Twit

I've discovered a great new way to waste time (actually, it's probably only new to me). You click on your most recent 'follower' on Twitter and look at their most recent tweet. Then you click on the person who appears bottom right in the square of people who they're "following." You look at that message then you move on to the person at the bottom right of their square and so on (okay, for it to be conceptually consistent, you should click on someone you're following in the first place. But I ain't following anyone, just dribbling out a kind of story - which is why no one knows it's there...). Anyhow, what you end up with is something like this:

sevensnaps: added #camerakit and #focallab to my iPhone apps, thanks @twin_arrow
glennjersey: New Be-mag Interview http://tinyurl.com/yfh7kvt
SuicideGirls: Win an iPod Touch from SuicideGirls! See who gets closest to dating a sexy girl who lives inside their iPhone. - http://tinyurl.com/yfo2jj8
dla35: This person has protected their tweets.
HMXkfan: Almost too busy to write here about how busy I am.
whiskeyfingers: This person has protected their tweets.
alyankovic: Documented proof that I’ve suffered vandalism at the hands of @rainnwilson: http://bit.ly/ccs2F
SklarBrothers: Performing tonight in Ann Arbor, Mi. At Live At PJ's. Come by to hear us expound on a new VH-1 Dating Show For Mike Vick: Vick of the Litter
michaelianblack: Idea for invention: a koi pond you pee in called "The Koilet."
marcmaron: @DaveTitle I'll give you a tshirt if you subscribe--maybe a couple of stickers.
enKirkman: @PFTompkins please remove me from this list.
nottjmiller: The Detroit airport is like hell but with a worse layout.
MarkBomback: finally i have a story for 'unsolved mysteries.' my son awoke this morning with a lone sock stuck to his head by a piece of duct tape.
MartinAmis: I need to work on my work-work balance.
vintagebooks: ...of someone famous buried in Highgate Cemetery plus the name of Diana Evans' prize-winning novel about twins
AnaBanana83: Miss Frank - more than the sum of their parts, deffo in my top 3 but that wasn't a great song for them #xfactor
marshawrites: Sod Blogger; I'm going to get my writing done for the day now! Ciao!
KwanaWrites: @ritzberries Hey you!
BlazeAuthors: I'm blogging on the 20th at the Blaze Authors Blog...on the "S" word and what to do about it.
TawnyWeber: New blog post: Quick Six with the Awesome Jeanne Adams http://bit.ly/6pvTg

I guess the real question is whether this is in any way interesting. I don't know. In a weird way it kind of is. Or maybe I'm just really bored...

Philip Roth on Philip Roth Tour

First the techno record and now this. I blame Global Warming...

"I Love The Darkside"

Speechbreaker is the best web-toy I've found in ages. You get to cut up and paste together the recent conference speeches of the three party leaders in the same style as Chris Morris's famous George Bush skit, then you can upload them straight to YouTube. What could be better? There are various glitches, like the fact that you can make you speech longer than it allows you to upload, but despite these irritations it's great fun. The first half of my attempt is above... The second part won't bloody upload. Tories in the machine...

Twitter, Ellroy and DeLillo's Swimming Trunks

Have been a bit crap at adding to this blog recently, for a number of reasons, but mainly because I'm having so much fun with my Twitter story. There are 35 tweets now, making a huge 4,900 characters-worth of prose to read. If you don't join up soon you'll have no idea what's going on (and if you do, you might not either). Thanks to the founding fathers, by the way - my 22 current, noble followers. That's more than Jesus had, for heaven's sake.

Meanwhile, if that doesn't entertain you sufficiently, check out Jame's Ellroy's promotional trailer for his new book. Jimmy Cash sent me the link but we can't agree as to Ellroy's levels of sincerity. I think he comes over as an egotistical dick, Cash thinks he's hamming it up for laughs. You'll have to decide for yourself (incidentally, Cash also says the book is great). The Ellroy publicity machine is obviously cranking up, as the man was also in this morning's Guardian, writing about Ed Ruscha. And while we're on the subject of book trailers - first Pynchon, now Ellroy..?! Is a film on YouTube now considered the must-have marketing tool for the heavyweight male American novelist? I look forward to DeLillo in his trunks, a tour of JD Salniger's kitchen, Philip Roth releasing a techno record. Oh, that one already happened didn't it?

Hyperkinetic Q+A

I've contributed a story to an anthology called "Hyperkinetic: High Velocity Tales From The Inner City. " (I actually live in the outer city, or possibly the outer inner city, but that wouldn't have made such a good title). As part of my punishment (possibly for living in the worng part of the city) the editors have made me fill out a questionnaire about who and what I am. They didn't tell me they'd posted said Q&A up because of my anger management issues but I found it anyway. Now, as part of your punishment, you can read it. Not sure when the collection is coming out. Thought it was this November but now I'm unclear. Anyhow, you can find out more here or here.

Techno Techno Techno Techno (part 2)... and Lispector

So, the good persons of 3:AM Press have started a Facebook page. By becoming a fan you can find out stuff about my upcoming book and what else they have planned. But you don't have to take the "fan" part too seriously...

While I'm feeling technologically empowered I've begun a story on Twitter. I don't really know how long I'll keep it up or where it's going yet. The only two rules are that I have to post at least seven times a week and that each entry has to be exactly 140 characters long. So have a look or follow it or whatever people do on Twitter. Oh, and remember to start at the bottom if you want to catch up...

And another thing. There was quite an interesting piece in the paper at the weekend - Lorrie Moore on Clarice Lispector. You can read it here.

New Book Coming Soonish!

At the end of last week I signed a contract in blood with 3:AM Press to publish (one of) my new book(s), called "work". It'll be coming out some time towards spring/summer in 2010. I'm absurdly excited. A few years ago, a particularly astute (if occasionally rather mad) friend and music business associate read one of my books and told me that I had made "the classic mistake. You're an indie artist and you signed for a major." At the time I told him that there weren't any real indies in UK publishing (a point which I could expand on and explain, if anyone were interested..). But now there is and suddenly the process of publishing feels a little more like I always felt it should. Oh, and the double-headed Andrew has even started a dedicated Twitter so follow it, follow it, follow it now (it's fun to have fun but you have to know how).

Officially an SF Writer

That's me, that is. At least, it must be because none other than the BSFA (or rather, Martin Lewis, sometime BSFA cohort) asked me to contribute to a pamphlet called "SF Writers On SF Films: From Akira To Zardoz". I'm presuming mine's in there though I haven't seen a copy yet. And you can't either, unless you're a member. The BSFA is hardcore like that. I will post my contribution here soon. Promise.
(Incidentally, should that title be "Officially an SF writer" or "Officially a SF writer"..? If I really were one I would surely know...)

Speech Debelle @ The Mercury Music Prize

What a long, messy and rather lovely night...

Bob Mortimer - We Salute You!

Was bored and tired last night and trawled iPlayer for something to watch and there it was - the return of "Shooting Stars"! Apparently they stopped making it cos Bob got fed up with it but now they is back. And I still love Bob Mortimer. Vic always played the evil dictator and Bob his angelic stooge. It's great to have him back on screen, particularly as he has gone bald and has his hair unfashionably long at the back, whereas Vic is all bleached and styled and celebrity-knickers. A quiet telly genius. Vic needs Bob. Him on is own is a bit like watching an Ernie Wise special. Even that Matt Lucas is funny when basking in Bob's glow. Bob for Prime Minister!