Things are happening

Work on Number Two got seriously delayed in the second half of the holidays recently, but all in a good cause. The final layout for The Snowing and Greening of Thomas Passmore arrived, prior to being sent to the printers, and I was bouncing about the place with a mixture of nerves and excitement as I worked my way through it, checking that everything was as it should be. It’s interesting to see ‘house style’ applied to punctuation and formatting (double inverted commas versus singles, for example) and to see what the words look like on the actual page. The process also made me realise how easy it is for a typo or two to slip into 84,000 words, even when you’ve drafted and redrafted dozens of times---probably because of that redrafting---but I hope and trust that every little i is dotted and every little t is crossed now. Having said that, I recently came across a typo in a recent edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four, which goes to show that these little blighters can even slip into the pages of modern classics.

Also heard that Borders (UK) have offered to include The Snowing and Greening in their Independents promotional bay for six weeks, from September through to mid-October, which will be a tremendous kick-start, following its release on 30th August. Great stuff!

And still on the good news front, The View From Here has been launched as a print magazine in the United States. Mike French, editor of The View From Here, has put together an attractive and exciting literary magazine using articles and interviews from the online version, and has generously given The Snowing and Greening of Thomas Passmore a significant promotion. Today the States, tomorrow the world! To preview the print magazine, follow the link in Mike’s announcement.