Listen to me!

Did the last interview on Radio Kent about the Writers' Room short story today and got to hear what they’ve done with it (fx, music etc) and it sounded really good. What is it about the combination of music and words – gets me every time.

If you have a hankering to hear the interview I did with Dominic King, or me reading the story, go to Dom’s homepage and click on listen again (you’ll have to choose his name from the list of shows there).
If you have no such hankering, skip the rest of this paragraph.
Once you’re listening again (you’ll come in on the traffic news) you’ve got to wait and hear the news on the roads locally before you get to me. There’s a brief bit of me, some music, then more me, then the news… Clearly too much me at any moment is hard to handle. If you want to just listen to me reading the story, go forward (from the beginning of the show) an hour and five minutes - you’ll come in on Dom doing a piece about film music (lots of der-ders!!!) but he re-introduces me after about a minute and then you get me reading the story. Yikes – the wonders of technology, eh?

Anyway, it’s been fun being on the radio and working on a project with the listeners to Dominic’s show.
Lots of people have asked me whether I got paid for being on the radio. The answer, as any recently-published writers out there will know, is ‘no’ – but it keeps your name in front of the public (at least in Kent) and if you’re lucky (I was very lucky) the presenter will be nice and keep mentioning the title of your book.

I know there’s been a bit of hoo-hah recently about whether authors should do radio and tv stuff for free in order to generate publicity for their books but, to be honest, although the free plugs are nice, that’s not why I agreed to do The Writers’ Room. I had decided, when MNW offered to publish Testament, that this was the beginning of a new phase in my life and I was going to grab it with both hands. Therefore, if anybody asked me to do something new, I’d do it (always assuming it wasn’t immoral, illegal or fattening and didn’t keep me away from the w-i-p too much. And it’s been a lot of fun. I’ve discovered that I’m OK behind a microphone, talking to somebody I can’t see – I don’t freeze or find I’ve nothing to say (not, sadly, a surprise to anybody who knows me...) I’m not quite as crap at short stories as I thought I was and radio journalism seems to be full of very nice people.

So, all in all, a very happy outcome to the embracing of a new challenge.

At the end of my bit on the show today, Dom mentioned the possibility of me being involved in something else which is coming up – Dom’s Big Book Club. Now that could be very interesting…