So...

While I'm being published here in the UK, my publishers are looking for someone to publish me in America. If anyone can help them (and by extension help me) you can drop me a line on the usual channels. Or talk to The Friday Project. (Just so you know they don't *need* help with this, it's more like widening the search).

For those that are interested in signed copies - we may be providing them as a service direct from The Friday Project. Otherwise I may be able to *cough* sort something out under the table if that is what people really want.

The book is 280 pages...but I'll save the big sell for closer to the release date.

Would you like to see the shiny new cover for my book?

Well here you are.

(Apparently it will be embossed).

So - I'm number one on Meet The Author. Number two is someone who I included in my link.

Dear reader - you are a force to be reckoned with. For one thing you are making my ego explode.

No wonder I keep getting people trying to buy advertising space on my blog for £40-50.

Dhaarling, I don't get out of bed for less than £100...

There wasn't a blog post yesterday as I spent all day working at both of my 'two jobs'. In the afternoon I was racing around East London rushing genuinely ill people into hospital. In the morning I was doing a bit of publicity for my book.

Now - given how us ambulance people make fun of each other, I'm writing about this only because you, dear reader, deserve a good laugh. I fully expect to get ridiculed at work. Can you see the trauma I put myself through for you?

The plan was simple, there is a company that make short 'talk to camera' videos of authors talking about their books. These videos then get posted on the internet, get linked to from Amazon, get sent out to independant bookshops and find their way onto touchscreens in Tescos. It's all good publicity, and I am a whore for publicity these days. They are called 'Meet The Author'.

So I found myself in my publishers office having to talk about my book in an unscripted fashion for around one or two minutes. In one take. While everyone in the office watched.

Well, after four or five attempts This is what we got. Please do not mock the video virgin.

Many thanks to John the camera guy who made the whole process much less painful than I thought it would be. After the first take where I stated my name, the title of the book, whimpered the word 'ambulance' and froze, he took his time to get me warmed up to the idea of talking on camera.

So, when you view the video I want you to remember that I had to talk off the top of my head into an unblinking camera lense.

One thing though - I do seem to be channelling Norman Lovett (without the jokes).


Of course, when I got home the first thing that I did was take a look and see how other authors did, and there are a lot of authors there and a lot of big names. I'm heartened to se that some of them look more frightened than I...

...although if I'd done my research I took could have had a 'stunt lime'.

If there is one thing that will rub me up the wrong way on the job, it's 'gawpers' - more so if they insist on providing not so helpful advice.

A case in point - yesterday I attended a call to a young lady who had suffered an epileptic fit in her hairdressers. Now epileptic fits are not pleasant things to have happen to you, and it's embarrassing at the best of times. Often you can vomit or become incontinent. You can injure yourself if you fall over onto something hard and when you do stop fitting your behaviour is often bizarre and aggressive.

All in all, what you don't want is twenty people standing around the door of the shop staring at you and pointing and talking about the patient.

Nor do you want members of this crowd kissing their teeth and commenting that the ambulance staff who are getting their equipment from the motor should "hurry up".

When a certain ambulance person tells you that you should leave the area as it isn't a public circus, you really shouldn't get arsey with them.

It's just a damn shame I had to look after a patient rather than have a blazing row with some jumped up girl who thinks it amusing to mock the defenceless patient.


Breathe...and relax...breathe...and relax...

It's why, when in a public place, I always try to get the patient in the back of the ambulance as quickly as possible, you have just got to love our tinted windows for patient privacy.

(Once I did have a teenager push his face up against one of our windows to try and see inside. A quick bang on said window with an oxygen cylinder soon stopped him and gave him a sore nose into the bargain).

---

I had a look at the changes to 'Da Book' suggested by the copy editor - all of them help the posts work better as a book rather than as a series of blogposts over time. Things seem to be happening really rather quickly at the moment.

Yesterday I had a nice little trip outside of London to Basingstoke.  Why there I hear you all ask – well, I went to visit a warehouse, the warehouse that my book will be distributed from.  MacMillian Distribution to be precise – the people that handle the Harry Potter books.

I went along with two of the editors from The Friday Project, Clare and Heather who are as lovely as they look.

To be honest, a lot of what was talked about went over my head, MIDAS and Vista are apparently some electronic way to order books, although that is just a guess on my part.

The real fun for me however started when we saw the server room – I’m enough of a geek that I had a small ‘nerdgasm’ over seeing two miniframes running in a heavily air-conditioned room and hearing about their off-site backup and disaster recovery procedures.

We were then shown the warehouse floor, where there are absolute tonnes of books all being moved around by forklift trucks.  It is here that the books are stored until they are sorted out into the orders that are shipped out to various shops.

Did you know that if you ship a wooden pallet of books abroad it has to have been impregnated with an insecticide?

And did you know that China won’t accept any wooden pallets at all – they all have to be made of plastic.

I also discovered that prison labour is used to process any returned books, and that recycled books are used to build motorways.  Yes – motorways are partly made of paper (which might explain a lot about the state of the UK’s roads).

We saw the system that they use to make sure that every book reaches it’s right destination (they weigh every book in their catalogue, then weigh the boxes as they go out – if there is a discrepancy then the box is re-checked).

Luckily we avoided the busiest time to tour the warehouse, all the forklift drivers were having lunch – otherwise we would have been dodging between these pallets being moved around at high speed.

I learnt about the way that Weatherstones orders books, and why they might not have a book you want in stock (apparently it’s called ‘C’ stock, which means that they only have one copy in stock at a time – and it takes three days to order a new copy).

It was great – it felt like a school trip.

Here is the thing though – at some point in July, one of those pallets is going to be full of my books – with my book title on the pallet sheet, and with my words written on bits of paper inside the shrink wrapped container.  Then they will travel down the conveyer belt where they will get sealed into boxes and sent on their way to bookshops around the country (where I shall be obsessive-compulsively rearranging the shelves to make sure my book is at the front…)

It makes me feel weird in my tummy.

(Oh – and when they are due to be released they don’t keep the new Harry Potter books in Basingstoke – it’s in a top secret location and they have security guards sitting on top of them…)

Back to the real world of ambulance work tonight.

 

All pictures can be seen in Hi-res on my Flickr Page.

For those that are interested – I’ve recovered from about a month of near terminal email failure.  So if you have emailed me in the past month or so – don’t be surprised if you suddenly get an email in your inbox.  The problem has now been fixed.

On 22nd of April at 23:59 and 45 seconds I had my last alcoholic drink for 1 year and a day.  It’s something I occasionally do – give up alcohol.  This will be the longest ‘fast’ so far.  The reasons are many and varied, but include…

• I’m getting fat.  With a beer belly.  This is easier to do than that thing called ‘exercise’.
• I have a bad memory – if I have two pints then I may as well write off any hope of remembering the night.
• Alcohol is a depressive – I don’t need any more help in unblancing my ‘bad brain chemistry’.  I have more reasons than ever before to be happy – there is no need to wreck it now.
• I’m always moaning about drunks – time to remove that bit of hypocrisy from my life.
• I’ve found myself having a drink after each shift – this is not good.  It might be alright for others, but experience tells me that for me this is a bad idea
• Bottles of soft drink and water are cheaper than beer.
• I have a bad memory…hold on…Didn’t I just…oh…yes…
• For those in the know – I’m aiming for some inhibitory gnosis.

Tomorrow I shall hopefully be having a little day out – I’ll let you know more on Thursday if I manage to wake myself up a 7am in time for the charabanc…

Apart from tomorrow I’m working pretty much continuously for the next fortnight.  My sense of humour may fail at some point during this period of time…