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A View From the Ass Hill  Mystery author and reviewer, Carl Brookins just interviewed Le Chef, you can read it here... Also, Le Chef's doing another live broadcast on the internet so join him if you can for stories and videos from my research, excerpts from the latest China Thriller to be published in the USA (SNAKEHEAD) and a live Q&A chat session. You can find it here: http://www.mogulus.com/petermaylive on SUNDAY 26TH APRIL 2009 there will be two shows, at the following times around the world... USA: EST: 10am & 1pm CST: 9am & Noon MST: 8am & 11am PST: 7am & 10am --- UK: 3pm & 6pm --- Central Europe: 4pm & 7pm --- Bangkok, Thailand: 10pm & 1am --- Beijing, China: 11pm & 2am --- Perth, Australia: midnight & 3am Sydney, Australia: 2am & 5am http://www.mogulus.com/petermaylive If you click on the above link at the moment you'll find some video clips of the last broadcast. And if you miss next Sunday's broadcast, you'll be able to catch repeat viewings afterwards - you'll just miss the live Q & A. Let's hope it all goes more smoothly than the last one!!! Ballistic missile? Innocent satellite? I don't know, but the photograph I've seen - okay it's a bit blurry, but I think it leaves us in no doubt. What have the North Koreans sent into space? Well, it looks to me suspiciously like a bottle of Guinness...   So we had a foray into the world of live video broadcast which was.... interesting! Considering we spent most of the 80s and 90s writing and producing television drama, you would think it would be a skoosh to do a wee live video from the comfort of our home. And it was... or at least half of it was. A bit of backstory. Le Chef's writing schedule meant that a US book signing tour was going to be impossible this year - so I came up with the brilliant idea of a live video broadcast to talk about his latest book Blacklight Blue and the other new editions in hardback and paperback which are coming out in the USA this year. The only thing was, to catch all the time zones around the world, I figured he should do two broadcasts. So he recorded part of the talk in four clips with some of his research video cut to music and we decided he'd kick off with that then switch to live for the Q&A session at the end. So - at 4pm our time, we set everything up and it goes like a dream! Recorded stuff cross fades to live. Q&A is great, people online from Lochgoilhead to Minneapolis! Cue a glass of celebratory bubbly. Phone to order a pizza from Georges in Saint-Cere. Collect Pizza to re-heat and enjoy after the next transmission... everything going to plan... the time rushes by and suddenly it's almost 7pm our time and we go to set up for the next broadcast.... With two minutes to go, we're sitting in Le Chef's study lining things up when we lose the internet connection. Nada. Zilch. Re-set. Re-boot. Nothing! It's too late for us to try and get to another internet connection and a mailing has gone out to all his fans across the world, so it's really important that we go live without delay.... If we can't do it - someone else will have to do it. We phone my brother in New York and do the old... "Okay, both the pilots are incapacitated, you're going to have to land the plane, oh and by the way, there's someone who needs an appendix taken out, but don't worry, we have a pilot and a gastric surgeon here in the control tower, and they'll talk you through it" routine. So my brother logs in to the TV station online pretending to be Le Chef, he locates the four pre-recorded segments, he presses all the right buttons, cues up the first one and Bingo! Gets it transmitting - only 3 minutes late! We give him instructions about how to do the others, then start phoning friends trying to find somebody nearby who has internet. We have 27 minutes until the pre-recorded stuff is supposed to link back to Le Chef live for the Q & A. Of course the nearest neighbours are suffering the same internet problem as we are. We have to try further afield. Finally we locate a friend and try to explain the problem - in French - he gets the point that it's an emergency and tells us to come over. A hair-raising drive, with laptop, in the dark through wee French country roads, up across the ridge, and down through a jumble of stone buildings (with a half an inch to spare each side of the car) to an 18 century converted barn which this photographer friend has converted to a studio. In we rush! Of course he's French so we have to kiss and shake hands and go through all the pleasantries. Then the wife and the son and the daughter-in-law and oh look you haven't met the new grandchild... all come out, to see us.... and they all have to be kissed and handshook..... and do we want a drink? NOOOO! It's an emergency - urgence! Comprenez! Damn, what's the French for "Live internet broadcast"?!!!! So down we dawdle to the studio where the photographer says to Le Chef, no problem - it's Wifi. Yes, it's Wifi all right. Password protected Wifi. Can he remember the password? Mais non! He never uses it himself, it's in his computer. But, he says, we can use his computer. Le Chef says it's a live internet VIDEO broadcast. So - he needs a camera. Is there an ethernet cable and he will connect direct to the modem? Oh yes, the photographer is sure he has one... Somewhere around here...........? or here........... ? or is it here...........? Ah yes... finally..... here it is! Le Chef gets his butt on to the seat, and logged in with his camera cued up just in time to hear his voice on video announce.... 'and I'll answer all your questions, live"..... cue camera.... action!!! He was on! Breathing heavily, but on! Answering questions from readers from Fife to San Diego. Unbelievable! Oh how we laughed. Well, afterwards, we laughed. Well, after our second bottle of bubbly back home in front of the fire, we laughed. And the best bit was three hours later.... the internet inexplicably came back. And just as we were going to say never again, all these E-mails came in from folk asking - when is the next one? Pheeww! Apart from that ... it was a breeze... So now the show's had more than 3500 viewings, I guess it was all worth it! If you want to see the recorded video, you can view it any time at http://www.mogulus.com/petermaylive ....and now he's thinking it would be fun to do another one! Between traveling around France and the USA to book signings and finding the time to write each new book in The Enzo Files series, it gets less easy for Peter and I to find a space in the schedule to offer our Creative Writing Course in France, so in the meantime, as I've just been appointed Feature Writer for the Freelance Writing section of the online magazine, Suite101, I've got the opportunity to cover a wide range of topics of interest to writers. It seems like the ideal place to offer Tips and Advice. Talking to some of Peter's fellow mystery and thriller writers, it became apparent that the secret to starting and finishing that book you want to write, is to develop habits, rituals and routines, which help to take the pain out of getting the words on the page - or into the computer. I've written a series of articles about "Writers' Rituals". Take a look at what they had to say, here...
First time novelist Aravind Adiga from India has won the Booker Prize worth 50,000 UK pounds (around 100,000 US dollars) and stated on BBC Radio that it won’t change his life. Oh Puhleeze.... Am I alone in thinking that this statement displays an extraordinary poverty of imagination? What is he thinking? He's a first time author, and his book has just won what is possibly the world's most prestigious literary prize. That alone pretty much guarantees that his life won't be the way that it was, or would have been without it. Or maybe I'm missing something... Maybe his face is usually filling TV screens and newspapers. Maybe he's used to having a nice big pot of money in the bank. Maybe he'd already sewn up his next few publishing deals, and had a guarantee in his contract that his books would be promoted and piled high in all the bookstores. Then yup, you can certainly see how winning a massive literary prize wouldn't affect your life much. Apparently his book centres on a man who dreams of rising up from his simple life as a teashop worker and driver, and bettering himself. What would that take, I wonder? Clearly a lot more than a bank account full of money and instant international fame, if its author is anything to go by... ...wrote Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Today President Mugabe was explaining in the Zimbabwe "Herald" why he wouldn't be giving up power no matter what the ballot results show, "We shed a lot of blood for this country. We are not going to give up our country for a mere 'X' on a ballot. How can a ball point pen fight with a gun?" So I guess the jury's still out on where this leaves the machete... You know, sometimes I become aware how weird it can be, living here... So we were at one of these book salons / festivals last Sunday. Every place seems to have one - from the huge ones like Paris and St Malo, to tiny villages. First of all I should explain - signing books in France is a lot different from signing books anywhere else. In most other countries you turn up for an hour or two at a booktore, maybe give a talk, sign books for a line of people, then sign a pile for the store to sell to collectors, then you leave. In France, each book salon is a once-a-year signing-fest for that location. It can last anywhere between one day and one week. and fans arrive to meet many many authors, get a chance to talk to them one-to- one about their writing, then leave laden with enough personalised copies of books to last them till the following year. Whether it's a local village hall, or one of the enormous exhibition centres, the set- up is the same. A local bookstore or bookstores invite the authors and supply the books. The authors sit at desks piled high with their produce like stall-holders at a farmers' market. And often, they're expected to be "on duty" all day, or all weekend, to talk and sign books. Last Sunday, it was just for a day. In a tiny village in the middle of deepest, darkest "La France profonde".  Le Chef only agreed to go because it was just 20 minutes away and it was a fund-raiser for a local organisation. Amazingly, the place was packed, people had traveled from miles around. They crammed into the village hall and squeezed along the rows, sometimes making five or six circuits of the hall to makes sure they got a chance to see all the authors and scrutinise their work.  But here's the thing that's really French... a priority here, is everyone's nourishment. So these things always close down for lunch. There were so many writers that the village's little inn had to take them in two sittings, but that didn't mean they were going to make lunch less elaborate. No no, oh no, not at all. We had soup, followed by a platter of cold meats and paté, followed by chicken casserole and rice, followed by cheese, followed by dessert, and then coffee to finish it off. Throughout the meal there was a never-ending supply of carafes of soft, quaffable red country wine. It was not "haute cuisine" but it was a fantastic example of real rustic, country fare, well executed. The people at the table around us were rather shy and hesitant until they established... 1) that we could speak French 2) that we were Scottish and neither English nor Dutch (sorry to the English and Dutch out there, but according to the French you have a reputation for not integrating here very well - so other nationalities reap the benefits) 3) that le Chef first fell in love with the area 33 years ago and returned every year until we moved here full time ...so the door creaked open enough to let us proceed to Stage Two What's Stage Two? Well we had to try to pass the "fitting in to France" quiz, during the meal... What did we think of the bread at the restaurant? What did we think of the soup? Did we know what "chabrol" was? Le Chef poured some wine into his soup plate when he had finished, swirled it around to get the last of the soup, then lifted the bowl to his lips and slurped it up. Big smiles all around! He's a Chabrol Man! We were doing OK so far. The chicken casserole was a very traditional recipe, were we acquainted with it? Of course we were, we said, we ate it for the first time at a village party years ago. Oooh - points for knowing the dish and bonus points for attending village parties. Then came the cheese test, how many local cheeses did we know? Well really, how could we live here and not have tried every cheese from this region and all the surrounding ones! We ran through them all. But did we like them? Mais bien sur! And what did we think of Cabecou? Ahhh... when it came to Cabecou (little round goat's cheeses) I had to express my preference, not just for the cheese, but for a certain local producer, Monsieur Estip of Autoire. Of course this meant points won for knowing and having a preference, but points deducted, because my preference conflicted with the questioner's own preference. His favourite maker, he explained couldn't produce Cabecou all year round as he refused to freeze milk! And since no respectable producer can have milk all year round, the others must be freezing theirs! So we moved from local cheeses to cheeses from faaaaar away, i.e. Normandy. What did we think of Camembert? We said we liked it of course. At this point, one man at the table who had been silent, suddenly came to life - aaaah Camembert. You haven't lived if you haven't tasted the best Camembert. We said we'd tasted some truly exceptional Camembert. The main interrogator wasn't convinced. He told us you can only get the best by going to where it's produced. Aha not so, I said. When le chef was being inducted as a Chevalier for Gaillac wine (surely lots more bonus points for that one!), there was a banquet and one group of guests at the banquet was a delegation of Camembert cheese producers who had brought with them their best offering (la creme de la creme...?) for everyone at the banquet to savour. Touché! The Camembert lover thought, then, in that case, we had definitely been privileged. He then went on to share with us his secret source for the best cheeses in the area - which turned out to be our favourite cheese stall-holder at the Bretenoux market. Well! He could hardly believe it! I think that means we're friends forever! Not to mention getting record-breaking scores on the integration quiz. Which made me think about those TV ads that we take for granted in France, which you simply wouldn't see in the USA or UK. No I don't mean the ones for shower gel or shampoo which show girls displaying an awful a lot more than Janet Jackson at the superbowl. No no. I mean the ones where four or five extremely large and hunky man-the-hunter types are out in the woods together. Fatigued - presumably from stalking the deer and wild boar - they sit for a moment on some conveniently placed fallen tree trunks. They look at one another, and with no need for words, get out their Laguioles (fancy folding knives that all real men carry here), pull out their baguettes, and start to pass around the cheese.. creamy Camembert... crumbly Roquefort... whatever... they pop it into their mouths and savour it. With knowing smiles they chew and nod at one another. "Does life get any better than this...?" is the unspoken message... "Out in the woods with my mates. My baguette in my hand, and cheese melting on my tongue." You know, now that I think about it... maybe they're not hunters... maybe they're lumberjacks... Whatever. Here's the really weird thing about living here - I watch ads like that, and they don't seem odd to me... What have I been doing lately? Well this, mostly Latest confirmed dates for the PETER MAY - USA 2008 tour... THOUSAND OAKS, CA: Saturday, February 16th: Mysteries to Die For, 11am - talk & signing Mysteries to Die For 2940 Thousand Oaks Boulevard Thousand Oaks, CA 91362 Telephone: (805) 374-0084 NEWPORT BEACH CA: Sunday, February 17th: - WINE TASTING + talk & signing To be confirmed SAN DIEGO CA: Monday, February 18th: Mysterious Galaxy, 3.30pm - WINE TASTING + talk & signing Mysterious Galaxy 7051 Clairmont Mesa Blvd. San Diego, CA 92111 Telephone: 858-268-4747 Toll-Free: 800-811-4747 Fax: 858-268-4775 SAN DIEGO CA: Monday, February 18th: Alliance Francaise and Mysterious Galaxy, 6pm - WINE TASTING + talk & signing Restaurant-Bistro Le Bouchon 511 West Valley Parkway Escondido, CA, 92025, Telephone: (760) 489-8666 Fax: (760) 489-8663 LOS ANGELES CA: Tuesday, February 19th: The Mystery Bookstore - Drop-by signing http://www.mystery-bookstore.com The Mystery Bookstore 1036-C Broxton Ave. Los Angeles, CA 90024 phone: 310-209-0415 or 800-821-9017 fax: 310-209-0436 LOS ANGELES CA: Tuesday, February 19th: Alliance Francaise - WINE TASTING + talk & signing Alliance Française de Los Angeles 10390 Santa Monica Boulevard, Suite #120 (Beverly Glen and Santa Monica Blvd) Los Angeles, CA 90025 Telephone: 310-652-0306 Fax: 310-652-0338 SAN MATEO CA: Friday, February 22nd: M is for Mystery, 7pm - WINE TASTING + talk & signing M is for Mystery 86 East Third Avenue San Mateo, CA 94401 Telephone: (650) 401-8077 Toll-free: 888-405-8077 CORTE MADERA CA: Saturday, February 23rd: Book Passage, 7pm - talk & signing Book Passage 51 Tamal Vista Blvd Corte Madera, CA 94925 Telephone: (415) 927-0960 SACRAMENTO CA: Sunday, February 24th: - WINE TASTING + talk & signing To be confirmed SCOTTSDALE AZ: Tuesday, February 26th, 2008: Poisoned Pen with Barnes & Noble and Alliance Francaise - WINE TASTING + talk & signing Barnes & Noble 10500 N Shea Scottsdale AZ details from the Poisoned Pen... Telephone: (480) 947-2974 TUCSON AZ: ∑ednesday, February 27th, 2008: Clues Unlimited - WINE TASTING + talk & signing Clues Unlimited 123 South Eastbourne Tucson, AZ 85716-5317 Telephone: (520) 326-8533 Fax: (520) 326-9001 HOUSTON TX: Tuesday, March 4th, 2008: Murder By The Book and Alliance Francaise - WINE TASTING + talk & signing Alliance Francaise 427 Lovett Blvd Houston TX 77006 Telephone: (713) 526-1121 BOULDER CO: Wednesday, March 5th: High Crimes, 7pm - talk & signing High Crimes 946 Pearl Street Boulder, CO 80302 Telephone:(303) 443-8346 DENVER CO: March 6th - 9th, LEFT COAST CRIME Left Coast Crime Adam's Mark Hotel 1550 Court Place, Denver, CO 80202 Hotel Telephone: (303) 893-3333 Hotel fax: (303) 626-2542 DENVER CO: Thursday, March 6th: Murder By The Book - talk & signing Murder by the Book 1574 South Pearl St. Denver, CO 80210 Telephone: (800) 300-2595 (toll free voice) Telephone: (303) 871-9401 (voice in Colorado) DENVER CO: Friday, March 7th, 2008: Alliance Francaise - talk & signing Alliance Francaise de Denver 571 Galapago St Denver, CO 80204-5032 Telephone: (303) 831-0304 MINNEAPOLIS MN: Tuesday, March 11th, 2008: Undle Edgar's - drop-by signing Uncle Edgar's Mystery Bookstore 2864 Chicago Ave Minneapolis, MN 55407 Telephone: (612) 824-9984 MINNEAPOLIS MN: Tuesday, March 11th, 2008: Alliance Francaise with Once Upon A Crime - WINE TASTING + talk & signing Once Upon a Crime 604 W 26th St, Minneapolis MN 55405 Telephone: (612) 870-3785 ROCHESTER NY: March 14th - 16th: - WINE TASTING + talk & signings To be confirmed NEW YORK NY: Tuesday, March 18th: Partners & Crime - drop-by signing Partners & Crime 44 Greenwich Avenue New York, NY 10011 Tel: 212-243-0440 Fax: 212-243-4624 I really was working hard. Doing important stuff. Looking for ways to improve the websites, when I found this.... Now, I'm sure there must be a pratical use for it... I know googling yourself isn't good for you, but it's amazing what turns up when you do.... http://www.quimble.com/poll/view/74 And this... http://www.whosdatedwho.com/celebri is just plain weird! All votes gratefully accepted! |
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