Famous for 15 People is an ebook of my writing. It came out last year, but I’m only now getting around to officially launching it, with an event at Brighton’s Regency Town House on March 15th.
I’ve described Famous for 15 People as a ‘mixtape’ rather than a collection, mainly because it doesn’t have the overall theme that a collection would. Instead, it collects a range of different writing I’ve done over the years. It’s a very mixed book, but I love all of these pieces.
The book contains a number of short stories that I’ve performed over the years: such as meat a story about vegetarian kink; or We have always lived in the Slaughterhouse, about a family forced to hide from abuse. There’s a story about Kurt Cobain and the clown-horror Death of a Ronald. One of my favourite pieces to perform is about ventriloquism, A bad place to stick your hand.
There’s also a few examples of microfiction, which I count as being stories under 300 words, preferably under 200. I’ve done a lot of this over the years through my workshop event, Not For The Faint-hearted. I’d love to do a collection solely of microfiction, but in the meantime I’ve collected some published and unpublished pieces here including Vole, Pinnochio and The Saddest Dogs in the World.
Then are the horror stories. I’ve written before about my love of horror fiction. I’ve become much more comfortable with working in this genre over time. One of the pieces in the book, In the Night Supermarket, was part of a magazine competition to find exciting new horror writers; I wish I’d followed up on that more. Death of a Ronald certainly counts as horror, and there’s also Eat at Lovecraft’s – a story I love, but one that frustrates me as I’ve no idea where it came from. Some of the horror pieces comes from my project Lovecraft in Brighton, a weird book that adds a new story with each copy sold, something I hope will begin moving again soon.
There are also a couple of pieces of non-fiction, one of them a history of vindaloo, the other a commission I withdrew about Britpop, memory and nostalgia.
It’s a wide range of pieces, all tied together by an introduction from Rosy Carrick. I’m proud of each of these pieces and it’s good to finally give them a home.