Gooseberry and the British Library

 

 

It’s March, and I’ve just had some exciting news. Gooseberry is to appear in a promotion by the British Library’s digital arm to persuade small digital publishers—such as my own Seventh Rainbow Publishing—just how easy it is to upload their titles using their portal.

 

Although digital publications have been around for quite some time, it often takes governments a while to recognize a new technology, to work out how it ought to be dealt with (a minefield of a question, which they could easily get wrong), and to find the necessary funding to implement their proposals.

 

In Britain in 2013, a law came into effect requiring digital publishers to fall in line with their traditional counterparts in offering a copy of any newly-published title to the British Library’s legal deposit. Thus the portal, the interface between digital publishers and the British Library, was born. I was proud to be included in the very first intake, and I am thrilled to be represented in the portal’s new promotion. I wish them the very best of luck.

Rather amazingly, “Gooseberry” has made it to the second round of voting in “The Three Bookateer” book awards on Facebook, in the “Best Cozy Mystery 2014” category, no less. Woohoo!!!

It may not have a hope in hell of winning, but wouldn’t it be great if it came second or third?…and you can help with this. Click on the link below, scroll down to find “Best Cozy Mystery 2014” (this is the hardest part, as the list is long, but your perseverance will be rewarded in the end), click the box to see the nominees, then tick the button beside “Gooseberry”.

 

Here’s the link to where you can register to vote: https://www.facebook.com/events/1528065474110144?/

Week 21

Today’s the day, the day the novel goes on sale. So far I’ve had a fabulous response to Gooseberry from LTER reviewers, who really seem to have taken the little chap into their hearts. It’s had a massive re-edit, which it needed, and now sports UK English spellings and punctuation as a result of one such review from a reader in California.

I knew fairly early on when I was writing Gooseberry that there would be at least one sequel and quite possibly a whole series. Characters like Mr. Bruff, George and George, Julius, Bertha, and Mr. Crabbit—good Lord, even the detestable Misss-ter Chrisss-topher—deserve the long-term character development that only a series can provide.

So what can you, the reader, expect of Octopus?So what can you, the reader, expect of Octopus, the next instalment of Send for Octavius Guy?Gooseberry, while Julius’s spoken English continues to deteriorate nicely under Bertha’s dubious care. The Georges’ “reducing” diets begin to take effect (or not), and Mr. Crabbit relaxes his policy on receipts. Actually, you can strike that last one. Gooseberry and Julius find themselves adopted by a dog, and man arrives from Glasgow claiming to be the pair’s father. I would have liked Gooseberry to have taken Julius to a piano recital of Bach—but instead he ends up taking both him and Bertha to the theatre, in this case a revival of the Jacobean tragedy The Duchess of Malfi at Sadler’s Wells. The duchess is strangled to death in Act 4, but revives briefly, causing Bosola, the character who witnesses this, to remark, ‘Her eye opes!’ I imagine most readers of Gooseberry will know exactly what Bertha makes of this! I’m aiming to release it on July 1st next year. It’s a tight schedule, but I think I can do it.

Next summer’s project, which I hope to serialize on Goodreads, will be set in the Lake Taupo region of New Zealand during the 1870s and 1880s. Hopefully it will be the first of three novels to explore how our sense of national identity was eventually forged. It’s based on historical events and characters that I’ve spent the past three years researching.

In the meantime I’ll leave this blog live, and I promise I’ll let you know straight away if anything interesting happens regarding the book.

So, I really hope to see you again next year. Thanks for coming along for the ride.

Michael

Michael Gallagher is the author of The Bridge of Dead Things and The Scarab Heart, and now Gooseberry, as well as the popular non-fiction title Why the Victorians Saw Ghosts.

Buy Gooseberry today at Amazon!

Photograph: The Seller of Shell Fish by John Thomson, used courtesy of the London School of Economics’ Digital Library under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 licence.