newsletter: may, 2001
I am very grateful for the amount ot email I’ve received as a consequence of writing I Hope You Have a Good Life (UK title All That Really Matters). When you’re deep into writing a book, it’s such an isolated place to be - so when the book comes out, and people write to you from the US, the Far East, Europe, to tell you how much the book has meant them, it compensates for the solitude. I should be used to that sense of writing in a lonely place by now, but it seems to get more difficult with every book. I’d like to thank people who write. They make it all worthwhile.
I’m still hard at work on a novel set in Glasgow. It’s tentatively entitled Egypt, Glasgow, but that title is under negotiation: meaning, the publisher doesn't like it very much. This is standard practice in the marketplace, where labels, for better or worse, mean so much. A bad title can kill a book. The story concerns a Jewish cop who lives in a part of Glasgow called Egypt: nobody seems quite to know why that area is so called. I haven’t been able to find out yet, but I’m working on it. The story also involves the Glasgow Jewish community - some 5,000 people out of a population of 650,000. I don’t think much has been written, in fiction anyway, about this aspect of Glasgow life.
Still on course for a reading at the Edinburgh Book Festival in August. I’ll be delighted to meet any of my readers who happen to be there. Now, back to Egypt…
The BBC4 reading of All That Really Matters (US: I Hope You Have A Good Life) was broadcast the week beginning March 26 and continued over five days. It was read, splendidly, by Scots-born actor Brian Cox, and the abridgement by producer Jane Marshall was superb. The reading has had a very positive effect on British sales. I was delighted with the whole venture.
The US paperback edition is coming out early in 2002, from Three Rivers Press. I hope this republication will bring the book to a wider American audience.
Edinburgh Festival 2001: an appearance there has been confirmed for August 13th, at 5PM in The Studio Theatre, where I’ll be sharing the platform with thriller writer Robert Goddard. I look forward to this. Public appearances sometimes fill me with a cold terror.
Writers are often very private people, fond of their own company, and friends with the characters they create in their heads. Going public can sometimes be spooky. I should be used to it by now, because I’ve done a number of public appearances around the world, but somehow there’s always a shot of nervousness before the event. I hope it doesn’t show.
The new novel, The Bad Fire, scheduled for publication in the UK in May, has been selected by The Scotsman for serialization over a period of three days. Since fiction hardly ever appears in national newspapers, this is exciting.
When a new book comes out, there’s always an apprehension (it’s another kind of public appearance, basically), more so this time because The Bad Fire is set in Glasgow, my home town, and I’ve never written about the place before. I haven’t lived there since the middle of the 1960s, consequently I’ve made frequent trips to bring myself up to scratch on the city’s development - it is an absolutely wonderful Victorian city, and it’s a shame so many American tourists elect to visit Edinburgh rather than Glasgow. There’s a great buzz about Glasgow: it’s changed utterly since I was a kid there.
I enjoyed writing about Glasgow so much I decided to set a second novel there; it’s about a Jewish cop who lives in an area of Glasgow called Egypt. Truly. The working title is Egypt, Glasgow, but the publishers will probably tell me that isn’t commercial enough. They usually do.
contents©2006 Campbell Armstrong
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