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Or the Bull Kills You UK paperback

The UK paperback of Or the Bull Kills You will be published one week from now, on 1 March.

Please help to spread the word!

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Agent Garbo

Today, 14th February, would have been the 100th birthday of the Catalan Juan Pujol. Under the alias GARBO, Pujol was a hugely important double agent working for MI5 during WWII, and played a crucial role in the success of the Normandy landings. He is the subject of the book I am currently working on (and the reason why I haven't been blogging so much in recent weeks.) My book, currently titled AGENT GARBO, will hopefully appear in late 2013 or early 2014.

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Webster's Golden Social-Media Rules for Authors

Rule No.1 (there is only one):

THERE ARE NO FUCKING RULES

It's social, right? You don't have to sing karaoke every time you go to the pub, or play strip poker every time you're invited to a dinner party.

It's the same with social media. If you want to sit quietly in a corner listening to others, that's fine. If you want to strike up conversation with strangers, that's OK too. If you want to talk when you feel like it and then disappear for a few days or weeks, that's great. In fact, as a serious writer, that's not a bad idea at all. It's in those moments of slower quiet, removed from the noise of the world, that real ideas can come, as many others have commented, most recently Pico Iyer in the New York Times.

So ignore the articles out there promising to give you instant publishing success by following a few guidelines for Twitter, Facebook and the rest. Who cares how many followers Neil Gaiman has? So you've only got a few dozen. Let's hope they actually read your tweets. If you generally say something interesting, the chances are that they are.

What's important is authenticity. And you're either being yourself or you aren't. People can generally tell over social media as much as when meeting in a bar.

The thing is, there aren't any rules to be passed on about authenticity.

That's the beauty of it.

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Quality, not quantity

I've finally worked out why I loathe the dominant 'safety culture' of our society so much. It's not just that it limits and restricts, curtailing our need for adventure. Or that it manipulates and conditions (as opposed to educating) us into certain patterns of behaviour. Or that it just makes life dull, giving far too much power to headmistressy busy-body types to tell us what is or isn't acceptable behaviour. Or that it reduces a sense of self responsibility, based instead on the laughable idea that someone else is always to blame (and thereby sue-able) for our misadventures. Or that it infantilises an entire society. No. What really gets me about the 'safety' obsession of today is that it assumes that the objective of life is to live as long as possible. That's it. Nothing more. In other words, that quantity overrides quality entirely. In a society where people live relatively short lives (say an average of only 30 or 40 years) you would be forgiven for thinking that longevity was something desirable in itself, and that anyone who made it to 60+ was probably doing something right at least. Make it to 80+ and you would be considered semi-divine. The Anti-Pope Benedict XIII was almost 90 before he finally gave up the ghost. In the XIV century it was taken as a sign by his supporters that he had been right all along in his stance against Rome. But in a world where life expectancy has risen so much, dying in your 90s or even later is no longer note-worthy: it is becoming the norm (at least in the developed world). So you would think that in such circumstances we would focus less on simply staying alive and more on giving our lives some sort of meaning, or real quality. Yet the reverse is the case. Hence all the laws brought in 'for our own safety', trying to smooth out all the rough edges of life, to help us slither unhindered towards an ever more distant end. All this does, as I think we sense, is to kill us at some level. We may be physically alive, but what kind of life are we actually permitted to forge for ourselves? What is the point of living so long if you never really have a chance to live at all? As a society we have been blinded by greed, perhaps - a greed for more life. Like a kid in a sweet shop, we have a taste of something we like (longevity) and we want more of it, ever fearful that it might be taken away from us. But sweets in themselves are not food. And life should be measured in more than simply years. How awful, we cry, when a talented artist dies young. What a waste. Perhaps. Or perhaps not.

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New cover for the next Max Cámara novel

UK publication is due in June 2012.

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Or the Bull Kills You interview

A new, short video has gone up on YouTube, where I talk a little more about the first in the Max Cámara series of detective novels, Or the Bull Kills You. You can see it by clicking here. The interview was shot by Catherine Tosko, a film-maker currently working on a documentary on bullfighting, called The Bull and the Ban.

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Extreme Paella Club - winner 2011

As president of the Extreme Paella Club, I'm delighted to announce that this year's winner is Steve Carter. Steve made a paella using the traditional ingredients (chicken, rabbit, green beans, etc.) in the Kalahari desert only last week, just in time to be considered for this year's award. His GPS coordinates were 21 degrees 32.500 S and 15 degrees 32.311 E. The committee was most impressed by Steve's insistence on using dried orange peel to light his fire with. Steve's prize as this year's winner will be announced in a later post.

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Kalila and Dimna

I've been reading the second instalment of Ramsay Wood's masterly retelling of the ancient Indian classic, Kalila and Dimna. This collection of stories and tales, many of which involve animals, has gone under several different names over the centuries (The Fables of Bidpai, or the Panchatantra), and is often cited as one of the most influential books in world literature. Aesop, Kipling and The Arabian Nights all owe something to its rich cornucopia of anecdotes. Here is one of my favourites: Once upon a time there was a madman who was convinced he was dead. Nothing his doctors said would convince him otherwise. He lay on his bed, stiff as a board, refusing to listen to them. 'Go away. I'm dead,' he'd tell them. One of the doctors had an idea. 'Do dead men bleed?' he asked the patient. 'No, of course not,' said the mad man. The doctor grabbed the man's arm and pricked it with a knife until blood started to flow. 'Look!' he said. 'Blood.' The man sat up, amazed. 'My God,' he said. 'Dead men DO bleed!' This is the second in what Wood promises to be a trilogy, telling the ancient stories for a modern audience. I can highly recommend it. The full title is Kalila and Dimna: Fables of Conflict and Intrigue

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German edition

The German edition of Or The Bull Kills You has just arrived in the mail. Title: La Muerte. Looks great. You can see it by clicking here.

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New book title

The second in the Max Camara series of detective novels will now be titled A DEATH IN VALENCIA in both the UK and the US. So please ignore any previous comments about a book called Some Other Body. That title came to me in a dream as I was writing the book, and it kept me going through some of the more obscure moments when I wasn't so sure which way the novel was going. But it has been decided that the new title will work better on both sides of the Atlantic. Eso es lo que hay as they say in Spain.