Nick Cave has a new novel, The Death Of Bunny Munro. He also has a very good website to go with it. Simple but effective, I especially like the video clips of him reading extracts and the limited edition idea – one already used extensively by HarperCollins’s innovative indie style imprint The Friday Project – is genius, not least because if they sell all 500 copies, and at the time of writing there are only 91 left, they stand to turn over £50,000. That’s a pretty smart way of making hardbacks profitable. The book will also, apparently, be available as an iPhone app, which I may well get just to see what it’s like.
I’ve been invited to write a 140 character story for the Story 140 competition being run by Twitter’s very own micro-novelist Nick Warren. A daunting task. If you haven’t read any of Nick’s stories on Twitter I suggest you stop reading this and go and follow him now. The drama, intrigue and humour he can find in 140 characters (including spaces) is staggering. My particular favourite being his story of Jan 19 2009, the eve of President Obama’s inauguration:
Welcome Mr President, we’ve been looking forward to meeting you. Agent Owen and I are with Alien Liaison sir, perhaps you’d better sit down.
Don’t know if I can match Nick’s pithy prose – as he puts it, a novel is a marriage, a short story an affair, the twitter story is a kiss – but I’m having a damn good go. Have written 10 possible contenders so far. I can only enter one, not sure how I’m going to pick, but so the other nine don’t go to waste, I’ll post them here after Nick has announced the winner of the competition.
So, 2009. Busy year. Three, possibly four book projects either underway or nearing conclusion. Can’t say too much now. To find out more click here to join the mailing list or here to subscribe to the RSS Feed.
