One of the differences I’m discovering between publishing a YA novel and publishing an ‘adult literary(ish)’ novel is that people ask you to write articles and the like to promote it. An advance chapter of ‘The Pretender’ appears in the new issue of Staple, out any day now. This little feature (with the photo above) appears in today’s Sheffield Telegraph, and is reprinted here for my readers outside Yorkshire (that’s Handsworth, Sheffield by the way). David Belbin was born in Handsworth in 1958 and now lives in Nottingham. He has published more than thirty novels for teenagers, including ‘Denial’, set in Sheffield. His new novel, ‘The Pretender’, out next week, is more for adults. It’s a novel about a bookish young man with an accidental…
The box above was one of many that arrived today at the publishers and distributors. Technically, it’s not on sale for a fortnight and I’ll be writing more about this, my first novel for an adult audience, in the coming weeks. But you can download an extract and, indeed, buy an advance copy of The Pretender here. It looks fantastic, for which all praise to the publishers, Five Leaves.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjwfNAYdBVQ] Aimee Mann was in superb form at Sheffield’s Leadmill on Thursday night. A mesmerising set. For the encore, she played the first four songs that the audience called out for. My shouted request was for the title track of her second solo album, a song that she wrote out of her friendship with the Labour MP Tony Banks. It’s about, broadly speaking, what it was like to be a member of the shadow cabinet in the mid-90’s – not exactly your usual fare for a pop song. Banks was a Mann fan. At a gig fifteen years ago, she told the Sheffield audience (I think it was the Leadmill again) that she’d been invited to tea at the House of Commons. Should she go?…
On Tuesday, out of the blue, I got an email asking whether I’d like to interview one of my favourite singer/songwriters, Aimee Mann, for the Star in Sheffield (city of my birth, where half my family live). It’s more than thirty years since I last did a music interview so I must have thought about it for – oh, at least half a second. A few hours later I found myself talking to Aimee in LA. Here’s the story as it appears in today’s paper. I’ve seen Aimee Mann’s three previous visits to the city, but it’s been a thirteen year wait since the last of these. On the phone from LA, she blames the long delay on promoters and looks forward to playing the…
I’m about to publish a novel which is partly set at one of the UK’s oldest (fictional) literary magazines, so it seems particularly appropriate to welcome a new incarnation of one of the last century’s best known little magazines, Horizon. The wide ranging magazine, out today, is edited by Jane Holland and published (online only) by Salt. There’s loads of interesting fiction, poetry, reviews and articles there, including a good article on how to get an agent and a new short story by yours truly. Check it out. Now I’m off to Stratford to see Dr Who and Jean Luc Picard in some play called Hamlet.