New Titles
Write On!
Write On! (ISBN 9781845377069), available now, offers a journalist's eye view of writing everything from a newsletter to a novel, and advice on surviving as a freelance writer.
Write On! provides all the tools and techniques you need to make your writing accurate, informative and entertaining. Learn how to research and order information, unravel the mysteries of punctuation and sentence structure, understand the process of editing, and discover how to apply professional standards to your work.
Written to entertain as well as inform, Write On! isn't a hectoring polemic or a dry manual on the use of words, but is intended to bolster the skills of novice and expert writers alike.
If you heard the interview with Martin on Jenny Eclair's LBC Radio Saturday programme, the impression was given that you can buy the book from here. Sadly this isn't so, but if you log on to Amazon.co.uk or any major book chain website, it is available there.
Hope is a Strategy
Now on sale, 'Hope' (ISBN 1845373766) is yet another one of those bloody sales books, but instead of being written from the perspective of a bunch of Stateside work 'gurus' with names like Fungal J. Ringtone III, it's the allegedly rediscovered manuscript of Victorian layabout charlatan Captain Chetwin de Clapham, and explains how to sell period rubbish to period idiots. Within its pages there's advice on taking candy from babies, pretending to have leprous ears, and of course, how to sell your grandmother.
Travels with My Chicken (ISBN1-84330-966-1) is the follow up to 'Hen, etc.'
* Buy this book direct from the author and save £2.50. See 'News' for details.
Most author tours involve events at local bookshops, press and radio features, and perhaps some television interviews. Very few include trips to nursing homes and prisons. Even less feature a live chicken.
Martin Gurdon is not your average author. He’s a motoring journalist who keeps chickens for fun. Having written a humorous book on life with poultry pets – Hen and the Art of Chicken Maintenance – back in 2003, he decided, not content with living the Good Life in Kent, to embark on an author tour the length and breadth of the country, with a chicken as his only companion.
From an interview on BBC Breakfast to a slot at the Edinburgh Fringe (via Lewisham Crematorium) his journey involved a host of bizarre settings and intriguing characters. In Travels with my Chicken Martin recounts the highs and lows of trying to entertain bemused audiences of pensioners, prisoners and the general public during Britain’s first hen-man author tour.
Wales was a particularly eventful leg of the trip. Place names caused confusion; Martin booked a B&B in Abergavenny for a bookshop talk in Aberystwyth, then mistakenly cancelled the one he did want to stay in. Upon arrival he scraped the vehicle he was road testing for a car magazine into a pebble-dashed wall, and turned up late for the much-anticipated bookshop talk. Following this, he was roped into a hen party of the pre-wedding sort, complete with karaoke, met a charming but gun-toting B&B owner, and survived an until-then dormant traveler’s bug contracted in Egypt the week before.
“I lay in the dark and considered all the negatives. There were plenty to choose from. I still had hundreds of miles to drive in a strange car and on roads I didn’t know, and would be forced to stay in lonely places just like this one. I’d have to be nice to people and make entertaining conversation when I felt like shit, and when I wasn’t doing that the only company I’d have would be a chicken” (p.86)
Things did improve, you’ll be glad to hear, and we discover how a man more accustomed to engines and spark plugs deals with a gaggle of toddlers at in inner-city nursery, clinging desperately to the few lifelines they do offer through their questioning. A far cry from this mucky-fingered madness was an eye-opening experience at Ford Open Prison, involving abundant scepticism and mistrust, an interview for the prison magazine, and a challenging conversation with a group of inmates.
Told with great humour and sometimes cringe-making detail, Travels with my Chicken is not so much a book about chickens, but a book about people, and shows how an avian companion allows you to be an observer of life as well as a participant. From the initially stone-faced teenagers who soon revealed a healthy childish streak in the presence of the chicken, to the war veterans of the famous Star and Garter residential home, Travels with my Chicken charts a series of strange, funny, occasionally tragic but always unlikely happenings.
From the events themselves to the happenings on the road, Martin’s travels with his chicken took him to places he would never have visited, allowed him to meet people he would never otherwise have met, gave him an excuse to road-test (and crash) cars and get paid for it, and sent him home exhausted, slightly delirious, but ultimately happy.
“I had come all the way from Kent to Wales, piddling like a fire hydrant as I went, had crashed someone else’s new car, heard the life story of a reformed-alcoholic soldier/chef and been told by a sozzled Aberystwyth teenager that I looked like her friend ‘when he’s old’. And I had made this journey with a live chicken. Suddenly it all seemed worthwhile.”
Fowl!
A parody of American business motivational books,
Foul! (New Holland ISBN 18453704) is a tasteless tale of a
dysfunctionally perfect white collar manageress called Shardonnay
Carat and her children, Doodah and Chimchiminy. Shardonnay manages the USA's
only pet taxidermy assembly line and discovers how making its embalming
fluid-sniffing workers behave like chickens can save the day. With
sub plots about a sinister English time and motion expert called
Arabella Thruppence, 'The Great Nozzo,' a flea circus ringmaster,
and a mystery pet assassinator, this book is ideal for reading in
the WC.