Seems the US is not quite dead and buried – agent says there are still avenues to try.
Tag: Hops and Glory
Hopping into the US… or not.
Disappointing news – for me at any rate – from New York: American editors like Hops and Glory, but not enough to commission it for a US publication.
Hop onto Facebook
I’ve set up a Facebook group to promote Hops and Glory.
Here comes the summer…
… and here comes Hops and Glory, just over four weeks away.
I am une chienne Andalusian!
Going on holiday at dawn tomorrow, so I won’t be updating for two weeks.
Those other Hops & Glory legals in full
I posted the other day about how evil lawyers are making publishers like mine very jumpy indeed by reading books for anything they might conceivably make a libel suit out of, then hounding people who have been written about to try and make them sue.
- I’m not allowed to refer to Mariah Carey as a “deranged diva”
- I’m not allowed to describe a “cave full of evil, bad-tempered little goblin cooks” and follow this with the phrase “shit, imagine that – a whole tribe of Antony Worral-Thompsons”
- And I’m strongly advised not to include the following passage, which was intended to illustrate my own incompetence in organising my sea journey to India, as well as highlighting the pretentiousness of the North London, self-loathing middle class of which I’m part. My editor didn’t think it was good enough to go in the book anyway – it didn’t make him laugh, and didn’t move the story forward, and given that we were quite far over the agreed length, no-one wanted it in except me. But it was legal worries that finally killed it. The conversation is presented word for word as it happened:
What the hell was I going to do?
Fat Lori ov Derby is a Slag
Hops & Glory is just going through legal proof reading just before it goes to design and print, and it’s throwing up some bizarre battles to keep in some of my favourite pet lines.
What your book really says about you
This is not just another desperate plug for a book that doesn’t even come out for another nine months, honest, but I was just checking the link to Hops and Glory worked (you can’t be too careful) and noticed that Amazon now does a thing where you can suggest key words that link you to other items “that have similar qualities” to the one being looked at. Hops and Glory has already collected quite a few, which is curious given that the only people in the world who have read it yet are me, my wife, my edirot and agent. Some of the tags are obvious, others less so. I’m grateful that one of the strongest tags is ‘humour’, but ‘travel’ and ‘India’ don’t feature. And the strongest tags – the areas that are most closely related – are… well, just look for yourself. Amazon seems to think I’ve written a book that combines one man’s beery adventures on the high seas with a penchant for poking around in people’s poo and pretending to be a doctor:
humour (5)
beer (3)
danny wallace (4)
camra (2)
pub (2)
pseudoscience (12)
friends (2)
alternative medicine (11)
science (11)
evidence based medicine (9)
gillian mckeith (9)
Is there something wrong with the sales blurb?
The fruits of labour
Talk to any author for more than ten minutes (and if you ask them about their work, you’ll be there for at least that long) and you can be pretty sure that at some point they’ll unintentionally use language that compares writing to giving birth. No massive insight there, the creative process and all that. Someone once said that giving birth to a child is like shitting a bowling ball. Obviously writing is not as physically arduous as that, but the mental equivalent to shitting a bowling ball sounds about right. And while writing is not as painful as childbirth, do bear in mind that the labour usually lasts for around two years.
But there are of course some wonderful aspects to both. You know when the expectant couple get their first little scan of the foetus and bring it home to show everyone? The equivalent for me is when I see the first cover design. It’s the point at which the book stops being something that exists only in my head and on my laptop and starts to take on an independent life of its own. So here it is!
Another thrill is when it gets listed on Amazon for the first time, and that just happened too. I was very touched to see that someone has already pre-ordered it, and that’s not me or my wife.
This book has ruled my life for two years – I was heavily into it by the time I first started blogging. I can’t wait to get the bastard finished and unleashed on the world. I’ve finished the first draft and it’s now with my editor, but it’s far too long and we’re going to have to cut about a third of it out – expect lots of IPA-themed blog entries to appear on here as they’re slashed from the book (a process Steven King refers to as ‘killing your babies’).
The book comes out on June 5th 2009.