Engine Punk

The Wormton Lamb has appeared on Amazon a couple of days after setting the title up. It has its full subtitle listed on the UK site and is number two in a list of books Bob Blackman in the US. Number one is by one of the other Bob Blackmans but, yes, I've crossed the Atlantic without knowing it. Amazing. But there's no sign of The Horsepower Whisperer in the good old US of stateside. Both are listed in Canada, however. These anomalies may change once updates to Nielsen bookdata flow through their system apparently.

The proof is here and it looks fantastic! Lightning Source have done a great job and addressed the minor quibbles I had. My rendering for the front cover is sharper than ever and the red go-faster strip is redder than I thought possible. Inside, the paper is really white and the text looks blacker than other books. It looks so vivid. Most of them seem to use a down market yellowy paper that might be made out of straw. And I think the publishers should have a quiet word with their printers for, by comparison with Lightning Source's results, I think their printers might be watering the ink. The cover for The Horsepower Whisperer looks like it's powered by batteries! Either that or I'm feeling euphoric. I haven't seen Bex yet to receive her graphic design analysis. She's probably practising for the London marathon. We're working on the cover for The Wormton Lamb and I got the first version two days with a very excited e-mail about getting excepted fo...

Drooper from The Banana Splits looks nothing like me Tap The Horsepower Whisperer, The Wormton Lamb or Anarchadia Publishing into any search engine and they all show up fairly well in the resulting, er, results. But a number of publishing types have said market yourself as well as your books so I checked out my own branding and looked up “Bob Blackman” on the internet.  This was very interesting. I found a whole list of Bob Blackmans on the net and none of them was me. Actually, that’s not true. The last one was me. Top of the heap was an American football trainer called Bob Blackman who was listed on Wikipedia. Apparently, he suffered from polio but this didn’t seem to stop him and he died in 2000 aged 82. It sounds to me as if his top ranking is entirely justified. Next up was Councillor Bob Blackman who is a Conservative politician. Oh dear. I despise most politicians but especially those who represent the Fascist Repressive Party. In third place was R...

Available now on Amazon While my book lurches towards the market place, like Frankenstein's monster, here's one that a long standing friend of mine, Pete Cross, has recently had published. Shadows in the sky is about Cornish choughs and is a children's book that will also appeal to adults interested in the natural world. It's created a great deal of interest in Cornwall since choughs are the national symbol of Cornwall. However, until recently the chough was extinct in Cornwall but now they have returned and their numbers are growing. This is their story engagingly told by someone who has been watching over the original pioneering settlers for many years. It's attracting comments from some quite notable authors, too. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Shadows-Sky-Pete-Cross/dp/1904239072/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195396053&sr=8-1

Initial euphoria later gave way to a more critical appraisal of the end product Here I am with my galley proof. It arrived yesterday and Becky of Redsnapper captured the moment in pixels. Overall it looks fantastic. We'll have to re-submit because some minor things aren't quite right. I've already re-jigged the text matter. Word had re-formatted a paragraph with double spacing. It's clear that I can't trust it at all. I'll have to review every page of the pdf file before I re-submit. Thanks to Beck the outside looks really good. In fact the back cover looks even better than the front, although you can't see it so you'll just have to take my word for it (but not my Microsoft Word!) However, we have a cunning plan and a revised version is already in preparation. It's just amazing to think that after months, years even, when my book wasn't even a collection of disparate files, I can now flick through its pages, sniff the glue (what ...

I was not pleased the other day to discover that my blog was no longer writing in German. I’ve had a lot of IT incompatibilities recently. Biblical madmen spoke in tongues but I was writing in outlandish words or auslandishes worten or something. I was attempting to create an archive because you can’t see all the entries on my blog. On other parts of the blogosphere more advanced bloggers have indexes and archives. You click on the heading and there it is. I had a go and miraculously my blog stopped being a German one.  Not that I’ve anything against German readers. It’s just that I couldn’t understand what I’d written. And me with a German GCSE. I could only hope that the jokes didn’t lose anything in the unwarranted translation so putting an end to this behaviour was a bonus. I still didn’t create the archive despite following the instructions but I already know better than to expect IT to do what it’s supposed to. So I should have been up on the day. But I was...

Now that's what i call a voluptous tea pot Is this the most erotic teapot in the world? My sister thought so and, I have to admit, I think she may be on to something. I was partaking in an expedition to Trengwainton gardens near Penzance in Cornwall with my immediate family - Instant family? Just add tea! We asked for a pot of tea for three and got a very cheeky sauce pot, with this eye catching triple buttocked bottom to the pot. Marion couldn’t resist stroking it and out popped this genie.  Actually he’s another diner but he looks like one doesn’t he?