Events

Events, dear boy; events

This week I’ve mostly been finalising (or rather, having finalised for me) the first few events for the launch of my second novel, Night Fire, on 23 April.

First of all there’s the launch itself, which will be at Blackwells South Bridge, Edinburgh, on the 23rd, at 7pm.

Then, just under a week later, I’ll be in Lincoln for an event hosted by Lindum Books, at The Blue Room. This will be on Wednesday 29 April, hosted by Tim Rideout.

Next, on Monday 15 June, I’ll be in Corbridge, just outside Newcastle, for a book club event hosted by Forum Books.

I should also be appearing on a panel at the Cymera Festival in Edinburgh, on 5 June, alongside editor Dan Coxon and others, to talk about writing fantasy fiction. Here I’ll be drawing on my brief experience as a contributor to Games Workshop’s Warhammer worlds, as a writer for their imprint Black Library. I’ve kind of shoved this down the memory hole, so it’ll be interesting to dredge up my experiences again and talk about them in front of an audience, and the Cymera Festival is always great fun.

That’s everything so far, but I’m, hopeful I can get one or two more events slotted in over the summer. As a writer who lives in Edinburgh, with two novels under my belt, both published by a big publisher, one of which is published this year, and one of which is actually set outside Edinburgh, and where booking me would certainly save money in travel and accommodation costs, I can of course look forward to the Edinburgh International Book Festival getting in touch and offering me a slot for August, especially as they have so much space to fill and my publicist has pitched for me two years in a row, and… Anyway, I’m sure the invitation is in the post.

Regardless, I’m looking forward to all of these events, and getting the chance to talk about the book. I haven’t exactly detected a groundswell of eager hype for it coming out, and its Amazon ratings are not so much in the toilet as flushed all the way through the sewer system and out to sea, but I’ve come round to the idea that it might be quite good, and something of which I can be proud (an alien feeling when it comes to my work). The next hurdle will be seeing if it gets any reviews, and whether those reviews are any good.

Other than events prep, I’ve mostly been reading poetry this week; lots of Robert Lowell, confirming that although he’s one of my favourite poets, I really dislike his later work (those endless sonnets, as Dan Jacobson called them); as well as Elizabeth Bishop and John Berryman - that whole slightly doomed generation of postwar American poets, who brought a new level of emotional commitment and formal discipline to poetry. In a roundabout way, through reading his biography of Lowell, I’ve also picked up Ian Hamilton again; a totemic literary figure for me. His slender Collected Poems (sixty poems in forty years) is one of the books I’d save if my flat was on fire, and his combination of emotional charge and strict control, his evasiveness and reticence, really appeals to my sense of literary order.

Poet, critic, journalist, Hamilton was mainly the editor of a number of literary magazines over his life, including The Review and (especially) The New Review, which helped launch the careers of writers like Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Jim Crace and Martin Amis. I’ve got two volumes of his essays, and they make me yearn for a literary era that was over before I was born. Apart from his poems, I think most of his books are out of print now, apart from in that slightly tacky POD Faber Finds format, which is a disgrace. There was an excellent BBC4 documentary about him shortly after he died in 2001, which fortunately is still available on YouTube. It’s worth watching just to see Martin Amis playing snooker…

I’m breaking off from poetry over the weekend and treating myself to a proof copy of the excellent Gwendoline Riley’s new novel, The Palm House. To my mind her last novel, My Phantoms, is one of the greatest English novels of the 21st century, so I’m very much looking forward to this.