WORM IN THE BLOOD, BEAST BENEATH THE SKIN & HEART OF THE SERPENT…IN PORTUGUESE

A little while ago, I received the welcome news that my WORM IN THE BLOOD trilogy has been sold to a Portuguese publisher. I assume this means it will be translated into Portuguese and published there in a new edition, which I’m looking forward to seeing. Using Google Analytics, I’m able to keep a track of how many people visit this website (usually around 200 – 400 visits a month) and where in the world these web visitors are based. The majority are from the UK, as you’d expect. But there’s usually one or two visits to the site from people in all sorts of other countries, some of whom may well have surfed onto my site by mistake. But recently I’ve noticed a significant number of visits from web users in Portugal, and a few more than usual from Brazil, too. So Olá to all Portuguese speakers everywhere.

SLOW READER

Time has passed and the summer is here. I was working full-time for a while, as an exam invigilator, so I couldn’t do much writing. Then I got ill. Some kind of throat infection. The only good thing about being laid up in bed for a few days was that I read quite a lot. Waking up in the night, unable to get back to sleep, reading a few paragraphs of a book, falling asleep, dreaming that I’m reading the next bit - that sort of thing. No children’s fiction, but I read a lot of enjoyable novels. Amongst others, I read The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen, The Night Watch by Sarah Waters, A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro, and Martian Time-Slip by Philip K. Dick. A varied crop, but all good stuff, in my opinion. I’d like to read more, but I’m quite a slow reader. At the moment I’m chipping away at Dickens’ Little Dorrit. Some people, whose opinions I value, are in fact rather against Dickens. And I remember when I was a boy at school we would often be given comprehension exercises, which I hated, and the passage we were required to answer a list of inane questions on was invariably from Dickens, or perhaps Walter Scott. I therefore grew up viewing these writers with a certain amount of resentment. However, I have since revised my opinion, as far as Dickens is concerned at least. I suppose he has his flaws, but for me the teeming urban patchwork of his novels is hard to resist. Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner? There are still a lot of his novels that I haven’t read. They can’t be rushed, however. At least, not by me. Like I say, I’m a slow reader...