Fat Tuesday

Had my first swim this side of winter in the Southern Ocean this morning. It was a tad fresh. Not as warm as the Coral Sea, but clearer.

The first swim is always a baptism. Makes me feel summer is on its glorious way. Long days, warm nights.

Fat Tuesday arrived by post last Friday and I finished it yesterday. I'm not a fast reader, so that's the best sign. Have been looking forward to getting my mitts on this book every since I struck up a friendship with Gary Davison over at PaperBooks. We've travelled parallel journeys towards seeing our books in print -- enjoying similar high points and hiccoughs -- with our publication dates alternating two or three times along the way, to say nothing of the advice and book recommendations we've bounced back and forth.

I've always loved Chris Gooch's cover design for this book (it reminds me of Skinhead and Suedehead, which I read as a young teenager), and it certainly picks up on some of the elements from the story: the montage of a knife, a fight, an Australian beach, eccies, marijuana, a couple sucking face, all set against the top half of a young bloke's closely-shaved head. Nice font too.

Anyway, if you like your story to be action-packed and fast-paced, with a liberal sprinkling of sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll -- well, all sorts of music really -- then you should give this a try. I liked picking the nuances of Spencer Hargreaves' Geordie vernacular in the narrative and the fact that I felt I was being delivered a good yarn from start to end. Particularly liked the middle section, which lends itself to the title of the book: the description of the Fat Tuesday festival at Marasa Bay and the craziness of the world which the characters get thrown into there. The vitality of the writing reflects the festival atmosphere superbly.

Well worth a read, and available from book shops in the UK, from PaperBooks or Amazon. Good on yer, Gary.

Don't play with the crocs

During our holiday in Port Douglas, tropical north Queensland, last week, we came across this crocodile warning on the foreshore:

...next to the children's playground.


...and one of the swings was missing!

Saw these beauties in the Daintree River.

PS. Picked up a review in The Independent last Sunday. Getting some great coverage and interesting comments, even if they might have given The Snowing and Greening of Thomas Passmore an extra couple of spuds! (See Bio/Interviews page.)

Back home

Got back late Monday from nine days in tropical, northern Queensland. Bliss!

There are a couple of stories (involving crocodiles) from this trip that I'll share in a later post, but the first thing I've been trying to do is re-establish some sort of routine. It went to pot for a few weeks before our escape north, what with the book getting released and a rush on at work and the dreaded lurgy that knocked me for six (well, four perhaps) and...

But how wonderful it was to open my e-mail and, amongst the 80+, get a batch of enthusiastic responses to The Snowing and Greening of Thomas Passmore. Not only that, but Mike French posted a tremendous review at The View From Here and Revish, and Fossfor created an illustration that superbly captured a scene from the book. Also discovered today that the Daily Mail Online featured The Snowing and Greening, although the review (a paraphrase of the blurb followed by a one line crit) didn't recommend it: "Promising though this (storyline) sounds, the narrative darts down far too many lyrical dead ends"!

Never mind, I don't expect everyone to 'get it'. That's just the way it is, and it's fine. It makes every other review so much more delicious.

However, The Australian Times put together a very substantial response, based around a recent interview. So, all up, it's been a good couple of days, even if the temperature has been about a hundred degrees cooler in not-so-tropical Victoria.

PS. The pic shows the only place in the world where two World Heritage sites meet: the Daintree Forest's Cape Tribulation (Captain Cook had a tough time here after ripping a hole in his boat) meets the Coral Sea of the Barrier Reef. Pretty special.