How to be romantic (sexually transmitted viral)

Simply select the below, copy it and paste it into your email and then send it out to your entire address book.

______

Roses are red
        Violets are blue
From A until Z
        I will love you

Will U B my Valentine?

______

Have I "gone viral" yet?

We had launch

What a successful book launch we had on Thursday. Not an all-out red carpet, screaming adolescents, a-list guest-list type proper book launch perhaps, but then it's not an all-out proper book. It's a small, unassuming and unexpectedly sweet book. And the launch too was all those things.

We sold all the books we brought, once people realised the candle was not for sale.

Public speaking me not good, um, [refers to notes] at.

Polite laughter.

Mother came along, which was nice. Father didn't because he's dancing on a float at the Rio Carnival, which is also nice (for him).

Next stop: Booker prize (or even: straight to Best of Booker?).

Love Letters Launch

On Monday, 2 February 2009 - formerly Groundhog Day, now, perhaps, Alfie-and-Betty day - Love Letters: A very adult alphabet book was released unto the world. Britain was so excited that the day was pretty much instantaneously declared a national holiday: schools closed, white statues of commemoration sprung up across the country and God himself showed his approval by making it snow.

Tonight is the Launch Celebration. It's in London, after work. Here are the details if you fancy coming along.

Apparently as yet no sales figures have come back (I hope that doesn't just mean that "no-sales" figures have come back) but I have been sticking my head into Borders and Waterstones branches across the South to make sure they're displayed correctly.

Have you seen the new Anova catalogue? We're on the Portico title spread, so that's nice.

And thanks to Emily Carrington-Wood, WATERSTONE'S PLYMOUTH DRAKECIR for my first five star "review".

LoveLetterstheBook.com

Love Letters, my weighty Magnum Opus of over two years in gestation (really, two years: look) is finally coming to term. And this bit is the the labour bit. I've made a website for the book: lovelettersthebook.com and it took bloody ages. It's a labour of love, I guess.


It's all part of my cynical bid to "go viral", ie. promote the book for free from my bedroom. All the ingredients are there for your classic promo-site: a Flash game, presence on a prominent social networking site, downloads, an embedded video... and ta-da! One delicious viral. Now I just sit back and start thinking of puns for my Booker acceptance speech. Or is that like dropping flour and an egg into a bowl and saying ta-da! One delicious cake? Perhaps yes. I'd like Alfie and Betty to be the Crazy Frog of 2009... but how do you beat an amphibian on a motorbike (let alone one with mental health issues)?
It's Darwin's birthday soon, and thinking about Crazy Frog... isn't that just one evolutionary step up from the succesful fish-on-a-bicycle campaign Guinness ran in 1996? So perhaps there's the answer: the next big thing with the kids will be whatever is one-evolutionary-step-up-from-a frog riding whatever-is-one-evolutionary-step-up-from-a-motorbike... an iguana in a helicopter, say. Don't skip a step though: one day we'll be ready for primates in rocket-ships, but not yet. Space Chimps taught us that much.

IA: it's physical

I received a couple of the first copies of Love Letters in the post the other day, it's all very exciting. It looks really, really nice (and by nice I mean pink). All the colours and little details have come out perfectly. I'm pleased too with the thickness of it: the hard-back binding and 64 pages make it a veritable tome... definitely something that seems worth £4.99 anyway.

I'm sick of waiting for it to come out now. There's an impatient part of me that wishes it was battling away in the pre-Christmas promotional melee, but it would be near impossible for a nobody like me to take on books of the likes of Ross and Brand (I knew I should have done A is for Andrew-Sachs'-granddaughter), let alone Paul O'Grady, and plus the Valentines' market is undeniably more relevant.

Behind the scenes, all is apparently going well. A couple of major retailers have taken the book "on promotion", though I'm not entirely sure what that means, and there's an American publisher taking on a co-edition, though I don't know what that means either... I think basically someone changes all the s's into zs and then they sell it stateside.

Otherwise I'm working on building the website, lovelettersthebook.com, at the moment, which is taking longer than I expected but should be quite fun. And the book is up on Amazon too. You know that link on Amazon pages which says "I am the author...."? I can click that now. (I haven't yet, but I can).

IA: Update

I promised previously regular updates on my progress with the Inappropriate Alphabet, my book project due to be published sometime (hopefully) this year. And yet months on, this is the first such update... so if you've been hammering F5 or apple+R since then in the hope of developments, I'm sorry. There'll be more from now on.

The main struggle with turning what I had into an actual book has been the extra stuff, outside of the alphabet itself. I've drawn out end papers, dot-to-dots, quizzes and classifieds sections tried writing cast & character bios, contents pages, forewords and prefaces. And so far have had little success.

Otherwise though, it's largely been a case of colouring in all the originals. You may have seen already on my website the latest cover (with the sticker currently there awaiting a decent joke):


The title's Love Letters now, I guess that's pretty obvious. Here's the title-page spread:



And then there's plenty of redrawing to do too. A lot of it is now done, but I've still got plenty to go. Sometimes it's just a case of adapting the original, as in with O is for Orgy, to fit the new spread-per-letter layout. Here's the O spread half way through colouring:


And then sometimes they're just not suitable, as in with J is for Jailbait. I tried replacing it with J is for Jennings Mask, but apparently that's even worse. I'm inclined to agree. I coloured this in and it actually made me feel a bit sick...

IA: V Exciting

Having finished my Inappropriate Alphabet project months ago, I finally got round to sending it to some publishers. Whilst some recipients were no doubt disgusted and some simply perplexed, thankfully several showed genuine interest.
One of these was Anova Books. I met up with their humour/gift guy a few times and he was really nice (funny/generous) and, most importantly, he was really keen on the project and seemed to understand pretty well what I was trying to do with it.
Since then we've decided to definitely go ahead with it. Hopefully we'll be bringing the book out in time for Christmas 2008.
Now the real work has started. It was a bit weird at first, putting on a shirt to go and meet someone in a business setting to talk about the merits of just jerking off contrasted with jailbait , and discussing with absolute seriousness the chronological integrity of the narrative of 26 pages of crudeness. What is interesting is that the book works as a conversational catalyst: my publisher and I have discussed disgusting sexual acts we'd never bring up with our wives and girlfriends, and hopefully that is what is going to make it a strong gift book.

Something must be right about it anyway, because recently the IA page on my website suddenly started getting loads of hits from nowhere (well, America). Something like over 7000 people in two days looked at it, almost all coming via web-recommendation-application StumbleUpon. Look:


So now there's a lot more to be done for the Inappropriate Alphabet book. It's probably going to have a more appropriate title for a start. The too-rubbish and too-rude letters will have to be redone, some additional content will have to made up and thought will have to be given to colours and layout. I'll be putting things up on here as I progress (though not so much that you'll have no reason to buy the thing when it comes out) so stick your thoughts and opinions in the comments, I'd appreciate it.
It really is all very exciting. My dream of being a young novelist is being realised. Yes, I'm just like Zadie Smith...

IA: X, Y and Z

The final three. I wasn't sure what direction to take these in. Everything in life needs a punch line, and having Z is for zzzz was the idea that made me go ahead with this from the start. For a while I was planning on making the ending more sequential though:

X is in Climax
Y is for Yawn
Z is for Zzzzz...

It's fairly neat but putting X is in is too much of a cop-out to bear.
Y was a real struggle. I got a lot of tips and was looking into Yoni, so to speak, for a while. But yoke works more or less.

IA: V

You'll no doubt notice the reference here to classic Hitchcock thriller Rear Window. Low-brow filth, indeed...

IA: K, L , M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U...

The Inappropriate Alphabet: it's back. I should have this filthy childrens book ready soon. Printed up and on the shop shelves, or at least, printed up and in my desk drawer...
Charlotte's away in Italy this week, leaving me home alone. And whilst this does give me a break from the endless drudgery of married life (lawnmowing, bickering, Big Brother, Big Brother's Big Mouth etc.) and chance to work on "projects" like this it has been pretty lonely knocking round the house on my own. The two shootings pretty much on my Stockwell doorstep in the last week and a half have ramped up my paranoia from it's default code orange, which still means that when I'm home alone I mute the TV every five minutes because I think I can hear someone creeping up behind me (though I do this a lot less since I realised we have surround sound installed) all the way up to code FLASHING-FUCKING-RED. Utter, all consuming paranoia. I've been spending most of the days urgently, nakedly and armed with a non-stick frying pan pacing between the many windows and doors of the house, checking to see if the human hairs taped across their openings remain intact.
Living in complete isolation has driven me slowly insane.
Within about an hour of Charlotte's leaving I was arguing bitterly with an avocado onto which I'd drawn a disapproving face. I have entirely abondoned ablutions and dressing and just sit, for hours on end, dizzy with the heat pulsating through the closed blinds above my desk, flicking emptily through porn (as research) and that is it. My life alone. Sweaty. Filthy. Disgusting. Scared. I even did my shopping in Iceland.
Still, I'm off to Italy to join her tomorrow, so that's alright.























I'm not sure about V, W or X. Any suggestions?
I also recently did this elaborate sketch of a pretty girl, and idly started colouring it on the bus to work. It looks shit and off-balance now- not helped by the complete lack of lips, but may turn into something quite pretty. Then I'll ruin it by drawing in the rest of her, tromboning some old pervy Chris Langham type.

J

I, I.

Really not sure about these two, so if you're looking, leave a comment with your opinions.

D, E, F, G & H.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hogtie_bondage


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urolagnia, but you should at least know this one.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felching


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emetophilia


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogging_%28sexual_slang%29

C

Better known as a 'Hot Lunch' in the UK, apparently.

Wikipedia.

B

Wikipedia.

A

I've got a project I started thinking about a long time ago, which I'm slowly resurrecting. It's called "the Inappropriate Alphabet", and it's going to be a very adult children's book. It centres around two cliched post-modern bunny rabbits, nameless thusfar, and their sordid aebecedarian antics.
As with many terrible things, it all starts with Alcohol.