Support my Book: The Best Water Skier in Luxembourg

Although I'm working on 3 other book projects at the moment, I've just started another.  It's called 'The Best Water Skier in Luxembourg: Tales of Big Fish in Small Ponds' . The book will be witty but with a serious purpose. I will travel to a number of places to investigate experts and champions in small fields in small countries. As the title of the book suggests, I will start with a chapter on water skiing in Luxembourg. After which I aim to investigate:

  • The Icelandic special forces
  • The top bassoonist in Finland
  • The most popular heavy metal band in Botswana
  • The most powerful politician on St Helena
  • The greatest living Surinamese novelist
  •  Malta’s favourite soft drink
  •  The greatest living expert on Cornish

The book is going to be funded through a new crowd-funding publishing platform called Unbound

What this means is that writers take their book pitches directly to readers. If readers like the pitch they pledge to support the project and if enough people do so the book gets written. The link to my pitch and video is here.

 'The Best Water Skier in Luxembourg' will initially be funded chapter by chapter. This means that the basic level of support is only £3 (those outside the UK can also support books). There are also other levels of support on offer with some unusual incentives - T-shirts, postcards and if you pledge enough you can even come with me!

If you're interested and like the idea, I would be extremely grateful if you could perhaps forward the link to anyone who would be interested, or perhaps to facebook/tweet/blog it.

Finally, I will be pitching my book in person at Unbound's first ever live event at 12 September at The Tabernacle, Notting Hill. 

The West Memphis Three are Free

I just got back from 2 weeks holiday to find that the West Memphis Three are free! Great news, tinged with sadness at the time they spent inside and that technically they are still marked as guilty. The case was a reminder that youth culture can still provoke horrific backlashes. The metal and alternative music communities mobilised in defence of the Three but how much that was crucial in freeing them I'm not sure.