Dan Smith's Blog, page 29

Hit from Brazil!

Okay, well, just a quick one. I've been tracking visits to my website to see how many hits I get and things have been a little slow. Dry Season isn't out yet and I don't really expect too much, so it's always exciting to see that counter moving up. Most of the hits come from within the UK, which is to be expected, but there have been a few others. I had a hit in Japan. Oh yes. A few in the States, too – Colorado, Washington, Illinois. And one in … wait for it … Brazil. I had a hit (admitedly...

Halloween Party

Halloween seems to have grown so much. I know I'm not the first person to say it but…there you go. I do remember trick or treating once when I was in Sumatra. It was probably 1980, something like that, but it was a couple of Australian friends who introduced us to the concept and maybe they'd already been Americanised. Not sure their idea of a trick was so great though – sitting in a tree doing morse code with torches. Hmm. Probably get petrol bombed these days. In fact, I'm waiting for the...

Would you sleep in a coffin?

I once lived in a shared house that had a spare room, so my landlord found a new tenant. Now that's already pretty weird, right? Having to share a house with someone you don't know… It gets weirder. First thing the new tenant did when he moved in was cover every surface of the room with black bin liners. The room was like a plastic cave – a fetishit's dream.  And then he lit it with candles. Naked flames and flimsy, flammable plastic? Not a good mix. Oh but wait, don't go away, it gets...

Blast from the Past

Seems like I'm spending too much time thinking about the past. Only yesterday I was tweeting about pocketeers, reminiscing with a friend who also remembers pre-electronic hand-held gaming. And then, as if to remind me exactly how old I have become, I received an email from someone I was at school with. Yes, I know….school. Now that's gotta be more than twenty years ago. Phew. I put a quick note on friends Reunited to declare my publishing deal to anyone who might have happened to catch sight...

You can't beat the 80's for a good stalk 'n' slash.

Final episode of Harper's Island last night on BBCHD and…meh. It wasn't much more than a slasher film drawn out into thirteen episodes, which meant a lot of people running backwards and forwards to the same locations, looking worried, splitting up to make life easier for the killer ('one by one' was the strap line), and then watching while he murdered their friends. 'The Cannery' bloodbath was one man fighting off the baddie with a pocket-knife while his shotgun toting friends watched...

Sausages padded out with shreddded paper

Reading Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith at the moment, a thriller set in Stalinist Russia, and it's brought back a few memories of my time in Moscow as a student in 1991, just before the August coup. Mostly, I remember gray. There wasn't much to eat, sometimes eggs or sausages that were padded out with shredded paper – not so tasty. The bread shop sometimes had something to buy, but the queues were long and people grew angry if you bought too much (decadent westerners trying to eat!). You could...

Birthdays, Haribo and Bad Language

My daughter's birthday's coming up, so we had the inevitable party this weekend. Not one of those tiring, dance filled scream fests with children overdosing on sugar and Haribo, though. A smaller affair this year at the 'bouldering' wall in sunny Byker. 'Bouldering', I have learned, is climbing without ropes. Looks fun on the walls, with the thick matted floors, but I don't know how good an idea it would be in the real outdoors with proper sharp rocks and long distances to fall. Anyway, I...

The man from Google…he say 'Yes!'

Shows how little I know. I thought that all you had to do was design a web site, get someone to host it for you and then you were done. Oh no. No, no, no. I thought it would appear on Google searches straight away and the whole world would flock to my site. Turns out, it doesn't quite work like that. You have to wait, you have to be found, you have to be 'crawled' and probed and 'spidered'. And only then, after a bit of patience and whoring myself across the internet, has Google finally...

Nasty Footwork

Funny the stuff you think about. I was working through the first draft of my latest novel and I got to thinking about creepy crawlies and all those nasty critters we used to come across when living abroad. Scorpions in the shower, snakes in the veranda, furry spiders in the bedroom, that kind of thing. (Incidentally, did you know there's a Brazilian ''Erection Spider''? It's true. Check it out ..)

Anyway, it made me think about how people say you should bang your boots. Well, you should...

Shameless Self Plugging

So, is it wrong to plug yourself? And I mean that in the best possible way – nothing for the sewer minded to get excited about. Maybe I should have said 'blow your own trumpet'.So, is it OK or not? After all, in any good democracy, you're allowed to vote for yourself, right? Thing is, I've been crawling across the web, trying to find as many places as I can to propagate myself by dropping links and hints about my debut novel THAT'S COMING OUT IN FEBRUARY if you didn't already know (and the...