There’s still time to go over to the voting page on Big Al’s Books and Pals and cast your vote for The Sparrow Conundrum in the Humor and Satire section. I’ve been in London for a week and I’ve been a bit remiss about canvassing so this is a last desperate push. Voting closes at midnight (Al’s Time) on April 1st. If you haven’t yet done so, I’d be grovellingly grateful if you’d go there, scroll down, click on the Enter to Win tab below the Amazon gift voucher prize then select Humor and Satire. There you’ll find 7 titles, with the Sparrow at the bottom. Some people have tried but failed to register a vote. This is probably because they’re using Internet Explorer and that doesn’t work on the site. The other popular browsers do, though. My thanks in advance.
Other news, the warm glow that comes when a box arrives with copies of my latest paperbacks in it. I’ve already written about my novella for young people, The Loch Ewe Mystery, UK and USA but also in the box with it was my collection of short stories, Other People and other stories, USA and UK. I don’t think I’ve said much about it here but it’s got samples of the different types 
of writing I do. Crime is well represented of course but, as I say in the short blurb on Amazon, there’s also some which are humorous, some bleak, some long, some short, and they’re all about people. If you prefer ebooks, they’re both on Kindle but, despite the fact that more of my books are bought in their eformats, I still love the look and feel of hardbacks and paperbacks.
I’m also a bit nerdy when it comes to signed copies. I love them and I’ve got lots from the great to the less well-known. But it doesn’t matter how famous the writer is, the fact that he or she has scrawled something inside makes it more valuable for me – not in terms of money but in the greater connection with the writer. So I was pleased to read in a blog on Authors Electric today that there’s a way of getting ebooks signed by authors. It’s called Authorgraph and I’ve signed up to it. If you click the icon top right on this page, it’ll take you to my author page, where all my books are listed. All readers need to do is click on ‘Request Authorgraph’ under the relevant book and I get an email, write a message and ‘sign’ a copy which is then sent to the reader. It’s not just an automated repeat process – the author can either type the message and a signature or actually sign it.
Finally, this blog was originally going to be about a topic which came up jokingly while I was in London. I was talking about bringing unconnected things together to stimulate creativity and up came the expressions ‘existential slimming’ and ‘gastronomy for existentialists’. But commercial considerations have taken over so you’ve been spared that..