Brizzle and Brum

Two lovely America Unchained book readings this last week in Bristol and Birmingham... thanks to everyone who came along.

Especially my Mum who surprised me by sneaking into the Birmingham event unannounced.

I'd been on for less than a minute when I spied her on the third row. She even put her hand up to ask a question in the Q&A. It wasn't a question about the book... she wanted to know when I was going to give her a gimble - something I had once promised and have yet to deliver. Bad boy.

By the way, it's worth pointing out that I do see my Mum from time to time. And we do speak on a regular basis. She doesn't need to go to these kind of extremes in order to communicate with me...

Not sure if these links will all work, but Lucy from the Birmingham store has uploaded some photos from the event to my facebook page. This is me laughing at the way the staff were trying to cajole my Mum into joining in with a group photo and this is the group photo with my Mum standing reluctantly on the end.

I'll Be Right Back After This Commercial Break

This is published today. You can, ahem, buy it, if you, ahem, like.

It's a new edition. Some typos have been fixed but essentially it's the same words (and photos) but with a new cover and a friendlier price.

I've never had my name in shiny foil type stuff before. It's the publishing equivalent of having your name in lights.

I'm on Richard & Judy later today promoting it and I'm doing some readings in Bristol, Birmingham, Newcastle and Lincoln soon. (All of which are in parts of the country I didn't manage to get to for a reading when the first edition came out.) See the live dates page for details.

Mind you... the publication date appears to mean very little these days. I saw the book on display in a shop last week and have received a few e-mails from people who've already bought this edition. One of them (and I'm paraphrasing) said, "Hey Dave... I bought your new book... but felt a bit foolish when I discovered there was a DVD available. Oh well."

I don't know how I'm supposed to react to this. Other than chuckling to myself at the implicit laziness... or the idea that a moving picture is inherently better than some words on a page. It honestly never occurred to me that anyone would think the film and the book were in anyway equivalent. (Which is short sighted of me because they're about the same thing, right?) I guess because I know how different the two are I just didn't stop to think how it might appear from the outside looking in.

I'm proud of them both and if it were a narrative fiction then I'd understand the idea of equivalence because when you make a film of a book, you try to convey the essence of the book on screen. But that's not what was going on here. I was making a journey, not a film. If we were dramatising the book, we'd include the scene where the police ran us out of town and the bit where someone pointed a gun at us and the bit where we... oh, you get the idea and I'm rapidly disappearing up my own fundament.

In other news, I discovered the existence of a Grindcore (?) duo called Sandpaper Condom this morning. Truly. Sadly, not being British, they have probably never heard of Dick Emery.

Cheltenham

I enjoyed the reading at Cheltenham last night although I was slightly annoyed by how rusty I'd become since I last did one.

My performance felt woolly and shapeless at the start and I don't think I pulled it into proper shape until we got into the Q&A part of things.

I always like the Q&A bit, not least because it makes each night different for me and stops the evenings becoming routine. It was certainly interesting last night to find the questions were a bit more writerly than normal. Maybe it's a consequence of being part of a literary festival. Or maybe it's what happens when an audience breathes in Cheltenham's refined air. Or maybe it's simply because the book's now been out for quite a while and so more of the audience have actually read it and so have opinions and questions that relate to the content. I hadn't expected that - most readings happen so soon after publication that you can safely assume nobody there has read it - but I enjoyed it for all that.

Ahoy Fowey

Sometimes things fall into place and it feels like the fates are looking after you.

I really like the Daphne Du Maurier Festival. I've performed there a couple of times before and found it to be charming and eclectic and exactly the kind of thing a festival in a small town like that should be.

They asked me to return to do another book reading this year and it coincided perfectly with a run of existing book readings so it was really easy to say yes and add it on at the end. Lovely.

Then I got asked to do Grand Designs Live. They started looking for someone to present some films about quirky American houses for their Channel 4 show at around the time my film about an American road trip was broadcast on More 4. It rated well. The idea for the film is in part explained with reference to my interest in Googie Architecture... it obviously seemed like a good fit. I'm a fan of Grand Designs in its regular incarnation so after meeting the production team to discuss the films they wanted me to present I was very happy to say yes. Lovely once more.

There was the faint hint that there might be a spanner in the works when I then discovered that as well as making the US films I was going to have to be on the set to introduce them each night. The show was being broadcast each night from May 4th-9th and the reading was already scheduled for the 8th. Oops... I thought I was going to have to decline the GDL offer. But nope... there were only four American houses to visit - and the films would be played in on the 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th and then there was another UK based event they wanted me to be involved in which would be filmed on the day of the 6th and shown on the last show - the 9th. As if by magic the one day I wasn't needed was the 8th... the one day when I wasn't available. Perfect.

Well almost. Fowey is a spectacularly beautiful spot but it's also a very long way away from London. The original plan had been to drive or train it down a day early and extend my stay into the weekend and take in a few of the other festival shows hither and thither. (Kate Rusby was appearing there on the Friday night and she's ace so I was definitely looking forward to that.) Doing the return journey in one day seemed less than perfect. That could have meant spending twelve hours in a car just for a 75 minute book reading. But then my publishers came up with a new plan. An early morning flight to Newquay. A cab from there to Fowey. (Conveniently taking me from coast-to-coast. Sort of.) A reading. A few hours in the Cornish sun and then a cab back to Newquay and a late flight home. My trip to Cornwall would still be Rusbyless... but it was still feeling pretty close to perfect.

But then... while the whole of Britain seemed to be sweltering in the sunshine, Fowey was mysteriously beset by rain. Rain that started about ten minutes after I'd finished signing books and ended just as I got in the cab to Newquay. Hmm. Not lovely. Not perfect.

And to make matters worse, Newquay was then consumed by fog... which meant that our flight home was cancelled. I don't understand how these things work. I'm sure when a train is cancelled the operators are under some obligation to make amends. Buses are laid on at least. I've been in the States when an airline has had to cancel a flight and I saw passengers being offered hotel rooms overnight because... well, because you can't just leave people with nowhere to stay just because you've cancelled a flight. But here it seems you can. Ryanair cancelled the flight and we were told we could get a refund or we could rebook for the next day and that was that.

I don't think Ryanair actually have any staff on the ground themselves but the airport staff did a grand job of staying calm while dealing with a plane load of angry, stranded passengers. Myself and my travelling companion, Ed (see last blog) ended up having to stay over in Newquay and when you add the price of a hotel room into the mix those bargain airlines suddenly don't seem quite such a bargain. And because everything else was booked up we ended up staying in a rather bleak Best Western which was seemingly occupied entirely by a coach load of elderly German tourists unperturbed by its 1970s decor.

What a strange poetic injustice that my book tour should end like this. There I am promoting a book about my efforts to drive across the States without using any chains... and then circumstances beyond our control force me into the world's largest hotel chain. It felt oh so wrong. And yet stupidly inevitable at the same time. Ho hum.

Book Readings... and the Tellyboxing of Genius

I fly to Galway tomorrow for the start of another week of book-readings. As well as Galway I'll be visiting Manchester, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Dundee. The details/venues/etc are here. Hopefully I'll see some of you at some of them.

In the meantime... here's some rather jolly news. We made a one-off tellybox episode of Genius last year and it's no longer going to be a one-off. We're going to make a series of the show for BBC2 (as well as making more for Radio 4)

Of course, when we're going to make a new series we always need to have a fresh injection of potentially genius ideas... so get your thinking caps on and send them along. Don't post them here though and don't send them to me - I'm sure I'm the least organised member of Team Genius and I can't be trusted with important things like that. No, e-mail Team Genius at genius@bbc.co.uk (including your name and telephone number) or visit the Genius website.

Book plugging across the universe*... only going forwards 'cos I can't find reverse...

It's been a strange old week of promoting the book. I'm exhausted by the amount of press I've had... and delighted by it also. PR people have a habit of being very apologetic... they grimace and say, "I'm really sorry... but I'm going to have to ask you to do one more..." as if I'm going to be unhappy about promoting my own book.

I think some people think of the writing as the artistic bit and consider selling their wares a bit tawdry... but I'm not shifting souvenirs and merchandise I'm selling books and I can't imagine putting the blood, sweat and tears into writing it and then not encouraging people to buy the thing. That sounds like the masochistic route to me.

As well as readings I've been doing all sorts of interviews including one day where I think I managed 15 back to back. There's always a day like this. You visit the BBC and sit in a tiny studio (John, the studio engineer told me that I'd drawn the short straw and that my studio for the day was nicknamed 'The Wardrobe'.) while they connect you up to various regional stations. So you record an interview with BBC Wales, then BBC Lancashire, then BBC Bristol and so on. Some of them are live, some of them are recorded. I think I did interviews at 9am, 9.30, 10, 10.30, 11, 11.30, 12... then I went upstairs and did something face to face for a Radio 2 show before returning and doing 1, 1.30, 2, 2.30, 3, 3.30 and 4... then at 4.45 I got in a car and was driven to Basingstoke for a reading.

The only city we've stayed in overnight so far has been Leeds (which was lovely because I have a couple of longstanding friends there who I could have a bit of a catch up with.) I would have liked to stay over in Nottingham too because it's such a great city but the demands of breakfast telly meant I had to be back in London.

Exhausting as it is I really am delighted that there's this amount of interest in the book. Much as we like to grumble it would be much worse if nobody wanted to talk about it and I was calling the publishers pr office to check that they had the right phone number for me because I hadn't heard from them.

The hardest part of a day like that is remembering what you've already said to someone. Every now and then someone will ask an open-ended question like, "Tell us about one of the other places you went to?" and your mind goes blank as you can't separate what you've already said to someone else from what you might have already said to them.

The most enjoyable interviews have been the ones conducted by the audiences at the readings. There's always some overlap with the questions but by and large each night is different and it stops proceedings from being boring for me and hopefully means that the crowd go away knowing that they've had an event shaped by them. The Leeds event was huge - apparently the biggest that shop's ever organised and last night's in Hove was a joy too.

The schedule means I haven't had a chance to get online much during the week so I haven't been able to stay on top of things like this... so here's a quick round up of things that would have trickled through in smaller, daily entries if I'd had the chance...

WIN A HUBCAP (SEE PHOTO): There are four main characters in the book: me, Stef, Andy and the car. Only the car and I actually went all the way from coast to coast. I love that car. When anything fell off it I swiped it and brought it home as a trophy of my travels and travails. Most of them are on my kitchen wall. When the journey was over we nabbed the remaining hubcaps. I ended up with two of them. So I can afford to let one of them go. So I've given it up as a competition prize... which Play.com are running. I can't give you a link to the direct page because it seems to be embedded but if you visit their site you have a fifty percent chance of seeing a banner advertising the competition.

SIGNED COPIES AT PLAY.COM: In my last entry I gave this link to the signed copies that you could buy through Play.com. They sold out quite quickly... but this afternoon I'm going to sign another two or three hundred for them so they should be on sale again pretty soon. Every shop I read at always asks me to sign some copies before I leave so there always signed copies available at those stores too.

GUARDIAN ARTICLE AND PODCAST: Even though the event at Foyles was filmed the Guardian website has used a small audio clip from the night and illustrated it with a slide show of my photos. I think the photos works quite well. It's here. There's also an article I wrote about the journey in today's Travel section, here.

TODAY AT BORDERS, OXFORD STREET: There's another reading happening this afternoon (Saturday) at Borders on Oxford Street in Central London. I've had quite a few e-mails from people telling me that the shop hasn't been especially helpful when they've called and asked about it... which doesn't bode well. But I think it's the kind of thing you can just turn up to. It starts at 4pm. Come on down.

CARDIFF, APRIL 29TH: This event has apparently sold out. But yesterday I was told that they're going to move it to a bigger venue so if you've tried to get tickets and been told it's full you might want to try the shop again: Tel: 02920 387 909
(If you have a ticket and are worried about the change of venue I think it's very close to the bookshop so it shouldn't cause too much confusion on the night.)

THE WRIGHT STUFF: I'm appearing on the show every morning this next week. There's a small live audience in the studio so why not come along. You can apply here... or you can call Eric on 0207 985 1927.

I think that's everything. I have Sunday off. And breathe.


*- Not actually across the Universe. Just bits of Britain really.

Travels, Books, Stuff...

This is going to be a slightly unfocused entry... I'm playing catch-up with life at the minute.

My trip to the States was fun - largely because the people I was working with were fun. If they hadn't been it would have been pretty awful because it was all work, flights and long drives. I flew London to LA on Friday, went to work on Saturday morning and then flew from LA to Phoenix, Arizona and then Kansas City. On Sunday morning we drove a couple of hours out of the city and had another long day of work. On Monday we flew from Kansas City to Indianapolis. We worked all Tuesday before making a dash for the airport and flying to Dallas. (Tip, don't let a man called Tom programme your GPS... Toms think they know all about Tom Toms and you can end up driving an hour in the wrong direction and not getting to bed until 1am as a result.) We started early on Wednesday with a five hour drive from Dallas to Lubbock and then spent the rest of the day working. Thursday was one of the longest days of my life. I got up at 5am and left the hotel at 5.30. Another five hour drive saw me in Dallas where I boarded a plane bound for Boston where I scooted across the airport just in time to board another flight... this one to London. We landed at 5.20am on Friday. It feels like I went from 5am one day to 5am the next without experiencing a night time. Odd. And discombobulating. And you can see how liking the company of the people you're with - and the work that you're doing - becomes important in such circumstances.

I'll tell you more about the work another time. And I'll be visiting climatecare.org to carbon neutralise the trip some time this week. (I know, I know... it probably does more good for my conscience than the world but...)

I wasn't in any time zone for long so I never really acclimatised to the situation but I've still been a bit wobbly on the other side of it. I've been getting a bit yawny at around 4pm each day and managed to fall asleep bolt upright at my desk yesterday - albeit for only 10 minutes.

Having had only the weekend to recover I was straight back to work on Monday with the book event at Foyles. I'm really glad we did this event this way. It was done to create some video-podcasts about the America Unchained book for the Guardian website. The original idea was just to film me doing a sit-down interview with someone but I think those things can come across as quite dry and formal. Doing it with an audience - and taking their questions (instead of the questions dreamed up by your own publicist) made it more exciting for me and more fun all round. Given how tired I was during the afternoon it was good to have an audience to kick me out of it and give me the much needed adrenaline rush. The idea had been to assemble an audience of around 70 people. Normally when you do a free event there's a relatively large number of no-shows where people take tickets and don't use them... which almost never happens when they've shelled out actual money for them. With that in mind they oversubscribed it a little and gave away 100 tickets. I think three people didn't make it. Anyway, it was really enjoyable for me and a nice way to warm up for the impending book tour that starts soon. I'll let you know as soon as the videos from the night are put online...

The book isn't published until April 3 (but can be pre-ordered now, natch) and so I took a copy of my last A4 manuscript version with me to read from. But as it goes the publishers had rushed a hot-off-the-presses version to the shop so that the real thing was there. Seeing a printed book for the first time is always an exciting moment. Until then you don't really know how thick it's going to be, how it will feel in people's hands and so on. It's the moment at which all of the hard graft or writing is translated into something real. I'm very happy with it. It feels cared for and the colour photos lend it a richness that isn't common these days. Hurrah.

And then on Tuesday I saw rather more of them. A thousand of them as it goes. I went out to a depot in Essex to sign them for various book shops who've ordered some signed stock. It's events like this that destroy one's signature. Try writing the same thing - anything - over and over a thousand times...

Tonight I'll be recording an episode of Clive Anderson's Chat Room for Radio 4. It's about the week's news... I feel woefully under-prepared. I haven't really engaged with the real world this week - there hasn't been time. I'm sure some stuff happened involving a person and some other people and some stuff. Oh dear.


EDITED: To remove the gobbledygook random code that somehow made it's way in mid-word and also to say that Clive Anderson's Chat Room is actually on Radio 2 not 4 (I wasn't the only person who made this mistake, the audience's tickets all said Radio 4 too.) It goes out tonight (Thursday 20th) at 11pm and is repeated on Saturday also.

Before I go...

Whirligig Entitled America, A Detail., originally uploaded by Dave Gorman.

I'm flying to America later today. I'll be back in a week. And at some point I'll tell you what I was up to. It's going to be a hectic schedule that's for sure.

It's not so long ago that I was sat at my desk, spying the end of the book in sight and hankering after a big chunk of time off. It doesn't seem to have materialised.

I finished the book not long before the film was screened so I was thrust straight into promotion for that. And telly being what telly is, the film's broadcast seemed to remind a few people that I exist and the phone started to ring with a few offers of work as a result. Or maybe the offers would have come anyway. It's impossible to know for sure.

But anyway, the upshot is that I'm flying to the States tomorrow.

Before I go, there's another book related event I ought to mention.

The Guardian are going to host a few video-podcasts about it... which is lovely of them. My publishers suggested filming an interview with me and using that but I find those sort of things make me squirm. There's something insincere about an interview when the person asking the questions is really doing a PR job for the person answering them.

I thought the thing would have more energy - and honesty - if the questions were coming from, oo, I dunno... you. Yes. You.

So we're organising a small event for around 70 people so that you can do just that. Assuming you're one of the 70 people who attends it.

It's going to be on March 17th at Foyles Bookshop on Charing Cross Road in central London. People will need to get there for around 6pm.

We'll turn a camera on, I'll chat about the book for a bit and then there will be not just Qs but also As. I'll do the As if that's okay with you.

Then we'll turn the camera off and hang around for a glass of wine and a chat. I might pretend to be hosting a St Patrick's Day Party and you can pretend to be my guests if you like. (Not that we'll go on to the early hours or anything... it is a bookshop after all)

Anyway... as space is limited someone's decided to get organised with it, so the spaces will go to the first 70 people who e-mail dgorman@randomhouse.co.uk with their phone number and a question that they'd like to ask.

(Nobody's going to show me the questions in advance, mind... they just want to make sure that we don't end up with an audience of 70 people who all sit there in silence because they all assumed someone else would ask a question. That would make for an awkward podcast.)

Why not come along and help me cast my first pod?

Book Tour

I used to have a 'news page' on the site... it progressively became more and more bloggy until I eventually conceded that it was a blog after all and moved it all over here instead.

But as it's become more of a blog it means that when I post something more newsy I feel like I'm being remiss... like I should find something else to spice it up.

But there isn't anything really... just some news. But it is good news.

The book - America Unchained - is published at the start of April and so I'll be out and about doing some book readings . Hurrah for things like that. The dates and details have just been finalised and I've just added them to the live dates page of my site so if you want to know the finer details I suggest you skidaddle that way... but the broad brushstrokes are as follows:

• March
• 29th - Cambridge
• 31st - Basingstoke
• April
• 1st - Nottingham
• 2nd - East London
• 3rd - Leeds
• 4th - Hove
• 5th - Central London
  
• 27th - Galway
• 28th - Manchester
• 29th - Cardiff
• 30th - Edinburgh
• May
• 1st - Glasgow
• 2nd - Dundee
• 8th - Fowey (Cornwall)

I hope you can come along...

[Typically... as soon as this was put online, and about five minutes after I'd e-mailed my mailing list, my publishers got in touch to say there was another one they wanted me to do... so I've just edited this list to add the Central London reading on April 5]

Banter

I took part in a recording of Radio 4's Banter last night. It was recorded at The Drill Hall in London which anyone who has been will tell you is every bit as glamorous and exciting as New York's Radio City Music Hall.

I think it was the first thing of its ilk that I'd done in ages. I must have done far less other shows in 2007 than I normally do. I have to if I'm writing a book.

Normally when I'm writing I start each day by re-writing the stuff I wrote the day before. I find it helps to keep the tone consistent, gets me back into the right frame of mind by the time I start writing new words and helps me to pick up a few silly mistakes made through tiredness the day before.

But if I take a day off I have to go further back and instead of spending the morning picking through the last day's work I end up spending a day revising the last couple of days. If I'm forced to take a week off I virtually have to go back to the beginning. I end up getting far more done in five uninterrupted days than I do in ten days spread over, say, a month.

Which is why I said no to almost everything else last year - including lots of things I'd normally say yes to. I reckon with Annually Retentive, the editing of America Unchained, Genius on the wireless and the one-off tellybox episode I had more than enough distractions from the writing as it was.

Once Genius was out of the way in November I basically went into hibernation and committed every day to writing full time. I was amazed by how productive I got. It was strangely manic and exciting to do but also strangely debilitating at the same time. In six weeks I don't think I travelled more than half a mile from my front door which is just odd. So now I feel like a pit-pony blinking as it emerges into sunlight for the first time in ages as I try to remember how the world works when it isn't just me, a computer and the sound of typing.

With the film going out last Tuesday and the DVD being released today I eased my way back in by promoting the film hither and thither but Banter was the first show that I was doing purely for its own sake. It's hosted by Andrew Collins and last night's panellists were Richard Herring, Russel Howard, Dillie Keane and myself. I was feeling rusty beforehand and was slightly regretting saying yes to something where I thought I might be found out as the underprepared fool that I was but when it came to it the show was great fun and far more to do with conversation than with prepared material. Which is as it should be given the name, Banter.

They probably record about 90 minutes worth of material during each show with an hour of it being far too scurrilous (or downright rude) for broadcast. They're recording four more shows and I'd recommend it as a cheap (free) night out if you're down London way. You can get tickets from the inappropriately named tvrecordings.com who should have thought about the fact that it wasn't just TV when they started.


In other news, I saw a finished book cover today. Always an exciting moment and it's a nice way to be reminded that the hard graft involved in writing 120,000 words isn't in vain. It's real and in April it'll be out there... looking like this.

A book I like...

The book describes itself as being a collection of "Observations and denunciations from a founding member of Monty Python" which means that unlike many books this one can be judged by its cover. This is a collection of essays and columns from newspapers broadly about the war on terror. It's also wonderfully funny because while there's some anger at work here it has a kind of befuddled tone to it. The thing is the situation must be hard to describe when it's so hard to believe... but with wild analogies he makes a fantastic job of it and makes something we're in danger of becoming numb to seem every bit as ridiculous as it is. Terry Jones's War on the War on Terror

See all the books I've recommended so far here

A book I like...

This is a true story. Which makes it all the more frightening. When the US military decides to do some 'blue-sky thinking' to see if some of the Californian hippie ideals can be used in warfare you get a comedy of errors. When the impact of these ideas is felt by people (as opposed to just goats) it gets much more scary. Some of the reviews of this have shown gleeful amazement at the ability of a humourist to uncover so much which strikes me as terribly patronising to a man with Jon Ronson's track record. He's a fine journalist who has a very funny lightness of touch. But not only does he know when to tiptoe around a subject he also knows when not to. Brilliant. The Men Who Stare At Goats

See all the books I've recommended so far here.

A book I like

This is quite possibly the most fascinating book I've read all year. Using the analytical eye of an economist to look at the world it constantly challenges you to look beyond your gut reaction and to see things as they actually are. If drug dealers are all making easy money, why do so many of them live with their Mom? You'll definitely find yourself liberally quoting facts from it over dinner. Unless you eat alone. In which case you'll be thinking about it. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

See all the books I've recommended so far here.

A book I like...

Oscar Wilde meets Ian Fleming. It's a camp, witty, dark and amoral tale about an Edwardian-era James Bond but more importantly it's a real ripping yarn. I was about to say that I hope Mark Gatiss isn't too busy being one of the League of Gentlemen to send Lucifer Box off on further adventures, when I discovered that he already has The Vesuvius Club; A Lucifer Box Novel If you're that way inclined, it's also available as a graphic novel.

See all the books I've recommended so far here.

A book I like...

This is Simon Napier Bell's scurrilous, gossipy memoir of swinging 60s London and beyond. But he was definitely there. Surely anyone who's been rescued from a brothel by Keith Moon is worth hearing from. You Don't Have To Say You Love Me

See all the books I've recommended so far here.